Tag Archives: breach canary

Toward a Breach Canary for Data Brokers

December 8, 2014

When a retailer’s credit card systems get breached by hackers, banks usually can tell which merchant got hacked soon after those card accounts become available for purchase at underground cybercrime shops. But when commercial data brokers get hacked or are tricked into giving consumers’ data to identity thieves, there is no easy way to tell who leaked the information when it ends up for sale in the black market. In this post, we’ll examine one idea to hold consumer data brokers more accountable.