- The CyberLens Newsletter
- Posts
- When Trust Collapses in the Credit System
When Trust Collapses in the Credit System
TransUnion Data Breach Threatens the Financial Identity of 4.4 Million Americans
Devona Green Jordan
September 06, 2025
In partnership with
Run IRL ads as easily as PPC
AdQuick unlocks the benefits of Out Of Home (OOH) advertising in a way no one else has. Approaching the problem with eyes to performance, created for marketers with the engineering excellence you’ve come to expect for the internet.
Marketers agree OOH is one of the best ways for building brand awareness, reaching new customers, and reinforcing your brand message. It’s just been difficult to scale. But with AdQuick, you can plan, deploy and measure campaigns as easily as digital ads, making them a no-brainer to add to your team’s toolbox.
You can learn more at AdQuick.com
Interesting Tech Fact:
Long before digital criminals prowled the dark web, one of the earliest large-scale cases of identity theft happened in the 1960s with punch card technology. At the time, banks and credit bureaus relied on IBM punch cards to store and process personal financial data. A little-known incident involved dishonest insiders at a New York data processing firm who secretly copied stacks of these punch cards, effectively stealing customer identities decades before the internet era. What makes this rare historical episode fascinating is that it shows identity theft is not a purely digital crime—it has been evolving alongside every technological leap in data storage, from paper and punch cards to magnetic tapes and now to cloud databases. This little-remembered breach highlights the enduring vulnerability of personal information and why identity theft protection must be treated as a timeless cybersecurity priority.
Introduction
The fortress of credit reporting was long considered untouchable, a domain where the deepest truths of an individual’s financial history were stored, weighed, and measured. Yet in the last 24 hours, news broke that TransUnion—