Tom’s Guide: No matter how strong your passwords may be or how carefully you monitor your online accounts, a large-scale data breach can expose your personal information and leave you right back at square one. A recent study suggests some troubling statistics: an estimated 47 percent of all American adults have been affected by data breaches over the last year.
The information comes from the Ponemon Institute, a research firm that studies privacy and data security, which compiled the information for CNNMoney. Through publicly revealed information and its own best guesses, the institute placed the number of American accounts affected by corporate data breaches in the last year at 432 million — a particularly damning statistic, since the entire population of the United States hovers around 314 million.
