clipped from www.cnbc.com

On Tuesday, with all eyes on the inauguration, Heartland Payment Systems, a company that processes 100 million credit card transactions for 1750,000 merchants every month, announced that its computer system was hacked. Last year. Hundreds of millions of credit card numbers were potentially exposed.

This is not a new phenomenon. In 2007, the owner of TJ Maxx and Marshalls reported that 46 million credit and debt card numbers had been compromised. Recent statistics show data breaches increased nearly 50% last year from the previous year.

The scary part is that for consumers, there’s nothing we can do to ever fully protect ourselves. You can do everything right, John Ulzheimer says – from securing your information online to reading your monthly statements and keeping them in a safe place, and you can still be a victim of identity theft.