As technology infiltrates every aspect of our lives, we’re forced to put out more of our information than we may want.
Online databases aren’t infallible, as two very public breaches have recently showed us.
Let me tell you how these financial heavyweights were hacked for millions of user’s sensitive information…and how they knew about their vulnerabilities all along.
The worst part is, they did nothing to fix them.
These identity-theft scams amounted to $650M in damages. Since the companies you trust won’t, I want to make sure that your money is kept safe from hackers.
The headlines of late have been weighed down by news of massive data breaches in two of the most trusted financial companies.
Capital One Financial Corp. and Equifax, Inc. both suffered hacks in their databases containing user’s sensitive information.
Leaked data included dates of birth (DOBs), Social Security Numbers (SSNs), addresses, phone numbers, etc.
These companies gave up basically everything a scam artist would need to open a new line of credit pretending to be you.
Equifax is one of the three major credit monitoring services, and their massive data breach broke records in 2017.
Their recent settlement has the company promising $650M in reparations for their negligence.
The company’s chief executive “retired” before he could be fired and forced to forfeit his substantial pension packet.
After millions of Americans were harmed by the identify theft, people called for Congressional interference.
Unfortunately, Equifax was also considered a victim of the hack, just as much as its users who lost money and security.
You might tend to agree, but let me clue you in on something they don’t want you to know: the type of vulnerability they suffered had been well-known in the cybersecurity world for three years prior to the hack.
Cybersecurity experts came forward saying that the type of configuration malfunction had been known by the industry since 2014.
If you were an Equifax customer, the information and privacy you lost could have been protected with a three-year buffer to beef up cybersecurity.
To make matters worse, in 2017, Equifax did not disclose the hack to its customers until a month after it occurred.
The fact that this breach happened at all is a tragic triumph for the scam artists of the world, and it’s sad that no one stood up for innocent customers in the face of this threat.
Due to the lack of intervention, Capital One (who is well-known for their financial promises and charisma) suffered a similar breach just a few weeks ago.
A former employee of the cloud service used by Capital One exploited the same vulnerability that cost Equifax so dearly.
Its estimated that 140,000 Americans’ SSNs were compromised, in addition to 6 million in Canada. In total, over 100 million people were affected.
Experts believe that because, unlike Equifax, Capital One alerted customers to the hack right away, and the perpetrator was arrested before she could sell any personally-identifying information, that customers will receive nothing in compensation.
These online scams are the worst of company failures because of their preventability.
Your money and your information should be safe with the financial corporations you trust, and yet they continue to exploit you and claim to be victims.
It’s said that Federal Reserve regulators were on-site of Capital One’s cloud service, who is affiliated with Amazon, while the data breach was occurring.
Of course, now they claim they had no knowledge of the chink in their armor until after the hack came to light, but cybersecurity officials continue to argue that the problem was well-known.
In the future, I hope to see more oversight in terms of protecting consumers, rather than corporations, but I’ll rest easier knowing that you’re aware of this scheme now.
Your money and your information are worth millions of dollars to big-time corporations and hackers who would take advantage of them.
Don’t buy into the scam that’s already a multi-million-dollar business.
