 TITLE: What Is Account Takeover Fraud and How Can You Prevent It? CONTENT: How Do Criminals Get Your Account Information?\n----------------------------------------------\nFraudsters can buy stolen credentials off the dark web and use them to access your accounts. Where does data on the dark web come from? Data breaches are a prime source. The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that just over 300 million individuals were impacted by publicly reported data breaches in 2020. As massive as that sounds, it was a 66% decrease since 2019. Since its inception in 2005, the ITRC has tracked more than 12,250 data breaches involving billions of individual records. The first half of 2021 saw 846 publicly recorded data breaches, putting this year on pace to break a record for the number of breaches in a single year.\nAdditionally, criminals may use malware, phishing or other methods of identity theft to obtain your login and password information. Once they have credentials, they may attempt credential stuffing, where the login and password from one site is used to try to log in to others. Alternatively, they may execute a brute force attack, which uses bots to try multiple passwords on a single site. END