Keeping your privacy is a battle. Virtually every day there are disclosures of new breaches and vulnerabilities. The numbers of affected and hacked accounts are staggering. They range from the millions to over one billion. Here is a partial list, including companies and number of affected accounts.
Russian Hackers Amass Over a Billion Internet Passwords (various targets)
- AOL, 2,400,000
- eBay, 145,000,000
- Adobe 152,000,000
- Living Social, 50, 000,000
- Target, 40,000,000
- Zappos, 24,000,000
- Evernote, 50,000,000
- Dairy Queen, 395 stores, total size unknown
- Home Depot, 56,000,000
- Kmart, total size unknown
- Up to 160,000 Social Security numbers exposed in Washington state court hack
- J P Morgan Chase, 83,000,000
Banks and retailers are not the only ones affected. Snapchat, a service that promises your messages will disappear within 10 seconds exposed huge numbers of images through a third party app.
If you are a business with customer financial information, speak with security experts. They can help. There are software programs and best practices that can protect your customer information. Train your customer service representatives and bookkeeping personnel. Implement processes and train anyone who has access to sensitive financial information. Many of these major breaches could have been avoided.
What you personally can do:
- Change your passwords often
- Use 10 character or longer passwords, that include letters, upper and lower case, numbers and characters
- Passwords should be random and not spell out words
- Look for suspicious account activities
- Don’t use your dog’s name as a password
- Do not publish your date of birth on Social Media
- Tell the 3 major credit bureaus to place a fraud alert on your account. This way you will be notified when someone tries to open a new credit line in your name
Follow common sense security protocols. Be cognizant of new breaches, change your password and watch your account activity. Protect yourself from this epidemic.
