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Make yourself less vulnerable online (video)

Online security breaches are becoming increasingly common. But there are ways you can protect yourself.

Jennifer Haley
Jen Haley is a senior producer at CNET in San Francisco where she directs the news video team. She was a business news producer at CNN in New York for more than a decade and received the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship at Columbia Business School.
Jennifer Haley

Zappos, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Yahoo, LastFm, the Environmental Protection Agency, Stanford, and Columbia University -- all suffered online data breaches recently, says the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

In fact, this year alone, there have been 276 data breaches, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Statistics indicate that private sector businesses and the health-care industry were most vulnerable, falling victim to, respectively, 37 percent and 34 percent of the breaches. Educational institutions and the government/military sector had breach rates of 14 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The rate for financial companies came in at just more than 3 percent, according to the ITRC.

So if large companies and institutions with, presumably, payrolled security staff can get popped, is there any help for you? Here's a look at ways you can protect yourself from attacks.

Watch this: Protect yourself from online security breaches