First comes the notification that your personal data have been compromised in a data breach. And as sunset follows sunrise, increasingly that notification is followed by actual dollar losses in fraud on personal accounts, said Javelin Strategy and Research in its recently released 2013 data breach fraud impact report.

Wrote Javelin: "A single massive data breach can result in billions of dollars in consumer fraud losses. Data breach victimization has been increasingly correlated with fraud incidence over the past three years, with a walloping 23% of data breach victims in 2012 becoming fraud victims."

Worse news: data breaches are multiplying as cyber crooks recognize that credit and debit card numbers are as good as cash and, increasingly, they are easily stolen from poorly protected data caches.