MSNBC: 3 more US banks report possible cyber attacks

This post brought to you by LifeLock Twitter. All opinions are 100% mine.

In this case it was just a matter of customers not being able to access their accounts, but it could have been much worse; suppose hackers were able to lay their hands on personal information resulting in customers being confronted with identity theft.

This can happen anytime since practically everyone is banking, making purchases, and giving away personal information online all the time. This virtual world is an open door to identity fraud and protection is therefore of the utmost importance.

LifeLock is today's leader in the world of identity theft protection and information and provides its customers with top of the line identity theft protection through a suite of services backed by state-of-the-art technology, including information on all aspects of identity theft and threats.

If you think you don't need it then consider that households earning $100k + per year have the highest identity fraud rate at 7.4% and the average cost per person of having identities stolen is $1,513. A total of $18 billion was lost due to 11.6 million adults being victims of identity fraud in 2011.

More alarming statistics indicate that among the victims 6.6% are smart phone owners, 6.8% are social media users who click on the applications, 8.2% are social media users who have 'checked in' using their smart phone GPS, and 10.1% are LinkedIn users.

That was rather shocking to me and I am grateful we, and everyone else we know, have escaped identity theft so far. That can change in an instant though, because How hack-friendly is your password? It takes a professional .000224 seconds to hack a password with 6 characters and no symbol in it as opposed to 20 days if it contains 10 characters and one symbol.

Knowing this, how well protected do you feel now? Are your online banking, personal information and overall privacy safe and secure enough? I sure hope so, because it will be detrimental if your identity gets stolen; you will be faced with the consequences for the rest of your life.

The services of Lifelock are protection against all that and even then some. Visit LifeLock on Twitter for more info and tips and if you would be so kind to discuss your experiences and why you think LifeLock is necessary to identity protection, then please do so by leaving a comment on this post. Thanks!