Government records are now a vulnerability for consumers personal data. State records are under seige from hackers. Budget constraints have led to more outsourcing to cloud providers or other service providers of the state agency’s email, data storage, and disaster recovery services, for instance. But CISOs are lukewarm about their trust in the third-party provider’s security: Only 4 percent are very confident, with 74 percent “somewhat confident” and 18 percent “not very confident.” A recent data breach in South Carolina exposed over 3 million social security numbers to hackers. Anyone who has ever filed a South Carolina tax return since 1998 may be affected.

Once a breach of identity or personal information occurs, it is important to take action quickly. Upon notifying banks of possible account vulnerability, and credit card issuers of fraud, the next step is to discover the source of the release. In the event of bank account fraud, we are more frequently discovering that regular payees of checks are using account and routing numbers from received checks to create dummy checks or to initiate wire transfers. If a fraud occurs an investigation and forensics can determine which payee pilfered the information and stole the funds. These frauds can be partially prevented by setting up ACH block on accounts, or using a zero balance transfer account as a firewall.