Allstate To Acquire Employee ID Protection Co InfoArmor For $525M

To help address emerging risks facing consumers, The Allstate Corporation said it has agreed to buy identity protection provider InfoArmor, Inc. The deal, a $525 million all-cash transaction, could close later this year, Allstate said in an announcement.

“Consumers are increasingly at risk of having their digital identities compromised,” Allstate Chairman, President and CEO Tom Wilson said in the announcement. “Last year, there were over 16 million victims of identity fraud, which resulted in over $16 billion of losses. With the acquisition of InfoArmor, Allstate will protect more customers from this risk and help rebuild their lives after they have been hacked.”

Already, Arizona-based InfoArmor provides more than one million employees and their family members with identity protection at more than 1,400 firms. Of those firms, more than 100 are Fortune 500 companies. Allstate said terms of the potential deal are subject to customary closing conditions as well as regulatory approvals.

The news comes as a Gallup poll published late last year found that in the United States, individuals are more fearful of being hacked in cyberspace than being victims of other crimes, such as having a car broken into, being a victim of terrorism, getting mugged, having a home burglarized and being assaulted or murdered, among other incidents.

The company’s survey polled more than 1,000 adults, finding that more than two-thirds (67 percent) of U.S. adults worry “at least occasionally” about being hacked. In addition, 66 percent say they fret about having their identities stolen. According to Gallup, the percentage of respondents who worried about identity theft has ranged from 67 percent to 70 percent annually since 2009.

Twenty-five percent of respondents said they or a household member had experienced having information stolen by hackers as recently as in the past year. Another 16 percent reported being victims of identity theft. Beyond that, the Gallup survey noted, the theft of tangible money or property was the most “common conventional crime” to hit the surveyed population, at 10 percent.