Would this be the same Gemalto that was itself breached by GCHQ?
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/
Healthcare and government have overtaken the retail sector as most-targeted for data breaches, according to security firm Gemalto. A total of 1,673 data breaches led to 707 million data records being compromised worldwide during 2015, according to the latest edition of Gemalto’s Breach Level Index report. Not all breaches are …
As far as hackers are concerned, I'm pretty sure they already consider most of us to be beneath even Pod people. For them we are just numbers on a screen, numbers they can take and use as they please.
The odds of catching them are vanishingly small, their odds of profit are vastly superior to robbing a bank or attacking an armoured transport, and, if caught, the sentences they face are laughably short.
The only good news I take away is that, after a long period of suffering, we might end up with better international cooperation to take down the scum that steal identities, better protections in place to prevent ID theft in the first place, and a global economy that is more stable and robust thanks to global encryption.
Sorry, NSA & Co., but your worldview is going to be proven wrong by the very tool you abuse for your surveillance abilities. That little irony is the only solace we can get at the moment.
...are the reasons why hackers are doing as they please, I have no sympathy for most people being hacked, usually the hack happens because of a stupid security vulnerability, not having proper gear to protect the data, or just for plain stupidity.
I think is it more due to misplaced incentives than any of the above. At present, it is pretty much:
The corporation holding your data gets hacked -> You suffer
The world would be a much safer place if there was a proper incentive to look after your data:
The corporation holding your data gets hacked -> The corporation suffers