A couple of weeks back, the hacker group Rex Mundi blackmailed AmeriCash Advance, demanding that the payday lender give the group around $20,000. If AmeriCash Advance didn’t pay up, Rex Mundi would publish the thousands of loan-applicant records it stole from the payday lender. Now, a couple of weeks later, AmeriCash Advance hasn’t paid the extortion fee, so Rex Mundi did in fact publish all those loan-applicant records. This is a newsworthy story in its own right, but what really makes it important is that it reveals how utterly unsecured so much of our private information (Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, banking data, etc.) is. And our private information and other data are not just vulnerable to skilled hackers – it’s vulnerable in general because it is often so poorly protected.