How can Integritee help prevent fraud schemes?

What if your identity was suddenly stolen by criminals and used for fraud schemes? That’s what happened to the sensitive private information of 24 million people in the US.

Earlier this month, the SSNOB marketplace — an illegal data market — was taken down by the authorities, according to a recent article from Bleeping Computer. It is estimated that the personal data of 24 million U.S. citizens has been compromised, and is now forever in the hands of criminals. The FBI, the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the Cyprus Police recently took down said marketplace for selling highly sensitive personal data, including social security numbers.

The problem with data being stolen is that it can easily be replicated and once it is stolen, it is out in the open forever. With prices of around 0.50 USD per person, criminals can easily obtain large quantities of personal data. Some transactions on the marketplace exceeded 100,000 USD, which shows us that criminals are eager to pay for your private data and use it for nefarious activities like fraud schemes.

Bleeping Computer concludes, based on information provided by Advanced Intel, that the stolen data was mostly sourced from breached healthcare and hospital databases, which keep highly sensitive information. Unfortunately, those organizations generally lack the expertise and resources to keep their data protected.

The importance of data protection

This case highlights, once again, the urgency of secure data storage and processing mechanisms. Integritee provides the digital infrastructure for businesses and organizations to prevent these harmful breaches. It does so utilizing Intel’s trusted execution environments (TEEs) and the power of blockchain technology. Integritee does not only offer the benefits of industry-leading hardware security used by the largest cloud providers: it combines it with the benefits of decentralization and blockchain technology.

While mass adoption of blockchain technology has yet to take up among established industries, Integritee’s technology is able to offer these services with predictable and low fees, high throughput, and very low latency compared to other blockchain solutions while preserving privacy and integrity of data.