by Rob Douglas

While I am not a fan of New Year predictions, it is a safe bet that identity theft, data breaches and cybercrime will rise in 2009.

In fact, I have no doubt that identity theft - especially credit and debit card skimming - coupled with other forms of cybercrime and data breaches will compete with Wall Street fraud as the business story of 2009.

Retrospectively, if it weren’t for the economic meltdown this year, identity theft, data breaches and cybercrime would have been the biggest business story of 2008.  Cybercriminals took advantage of the economic turmoil smoke screen this year and will do so even more next year.

Unfortunately, the national business media have been negligent in their coverage of the attacks on the U.S. financial services sector by international organized crime and the attacks on the nation’s cyber infrastructure by nation states.  Hopefully, in 2009, the mainstream media will awaken to the fact that our nation is under attack from organized crime and nation states bent on pilfering our citizens’ financial accounts and our nation’s secrets. 

Even more tragically, the dirty little secret is that the bad guys are winning.

Early in 2009, InsideIDTheft.info and IdentityTheftBlog.info will demonstrate that the actual number of data breaches harming Americans is much higher than reported by organizations like the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the Identity Theft Resource Center.  The methodologies used by those organizations and others are flawed and result in a significant number of breaches going unreported.

InsideIDTheft.info and IdentityTheftBlog.info will also work to expose a number of trends in identity theft, data breaches and cybercrime that are not being adequately addressed by the business community and are therefore causing serious financial harm to businesses and consumers alike.

We hope you enjoy the New Year and we look forward to seeing you here every day in 2009!