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Medical Records Worth More To Hackers Than Credit Cards
HughPickens.com writes Reuters reports that your medical information, including names, birth dates, policy numbers, diagnosis codes and billing information, is worth 10 times more than your credit card number on the black market. Fraudsters use this data to create fake IDs to buy medical equipment or drugs that can be resold, or they combine a patient number with a false provider number and file made-up claims with insurers, according to experts who have investigated cyber attacks on healthcare organizations. Medical identity theft is often not immediately identified by a patient or their provider, giving criminals years to milk such credentials. That makes medical data more valuable than credit cards, which tend to be quickly canceled by banks once fraud is detected. Stolen health credentials can go for $10 each, about 10 or 20 times the value of a U.S. credit card number, says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence at PhishLabs, a cyber crime protection company. He obtained the data by monitoring underground exchanges where hackers sell the information. Plus "healthcare providers and hospitals are just some of the easiest networks to break into," says Jeff Horne. "When I've looked at hospitals, and when I've talked to other people inside of a breach, they are using very old legacy systems — Windows systems that are 10 plus years old that have not seen a patch."
> other times it's saved the credit card company thousands of dollars.
FTFY. Although it is possible that if it was caught in time then it saved the merchant thousands of dollars.
But whatever the case, it definitely didn't save you thousands of dollars. Federal law makes your liability a maximum of $50 (unlike debit cards where losses are only limited by bank policy and subject to the whims of your bank manager).
What about debit cards that can be used like credit cards? What's the liability on those.
It's a debit card. The fact you can use it to pay for something at the checkout doesn't make it a credit card. There is no credit involved.
except that the money is pulled directly from my checking account. I really don't like this feature, but all their cards are like that now.
All debit cards are like that. And that's why even if your card issuer promises low liabilities for lost or stolen cards, you may have an empty checking account for the entire time it takes to resolve the problem. Compare that to a credit card where the issuer is prohibited by law from acting on any charge that you are disputing.