Last year my credit card was cloned. Three times. In one year. Making 2014 a memorable year with regards to my buying habits. And last year we witnessed some of the highest profile cyber attacks to date. From Home Depot and Dairy Queen to Target and Sony, cyber warfare became a commonplace occurrence. And this is the same year that more data was being collected, the year of wearables, the year we put a smarter thermostat in our homes. The year we gave data to the cloud.

2014 was a big year for security. Cyber criminals became cyber terrorists. Sacred things like a peanut buster parfait and a James Franco film became our touchstones of terror. As the internet of things makes our network invisible, it exposes more of our data. The problem is that we are being asked to do what we can to protect ourselves. But we really can’t. And should we be the ones to do this? My bank should be doing a much better job. In my most recent hack, they had 22 days of false transactions before noticing something was wrong. But they have four years of my purchasing record, where a 3rd grader would be able to notice the variance and see that the false transactions were so radically outside of normal behavior and stop them. And the banks issuing the credit cards protect the consumer, but the big loser is the merchant. Which makes no sense, because the credit card companies have all the information. They have the power to know better and stop false transactions, but since they don’t feel the pain, they aren’t really doing a better job of stopping it.