A hacker in Seattle, Washington allegedly broke into Capital One Bank’s servers and compromised over 100,000,000 customer records.
Those records included credit balances, credit scores and social security numbers. If you’re a Capital One card holder, there’s a good chance she exposed your information to the bad hombres out there on the internet.
You can read more about the hack here. The New York Times has a great piece on it: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/business/capital-one-breach.html
Capital One says, according to the story linked above, that no credit card numbers or passwords were included in the breach but only time (and court documents) will tell if that’s true or not.
New York Times writer Tim Herrera wrote a four-part guide to protecting online PII/PCI data. Here are the key take aways from it:
- Set up fraud alerts. The three major credit reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — will alert you if someone tries to apply for credit in your name.
- Consider credit freezes. A credit freeze locks your credit files so that only companies you already do business with have access to them.
- Check your credit report. All Americans get one free credit report a year from all three major reporting agencies. Closely analyzing those reports can help you spot any suspicious activity.
- Consider credit monitoring. Capital One has promised free credit monitoring to consumers affected by the breach. You should probably take them up on that.
Beyond that, there’s not much we can do. Capital One has said they reached out to affected customers and as of yet, they haven’t released any online tools that would allow people to see if their information was compromised. If they do we’ll fill you in.
And, to get back to what I was saying earlier about Samuel L. Jackson, maybe this hack could lead to a new movie series. A movie series focusing on a credit card pitch man who’s had his personal data compromised by a hacker.
He and his sidekick (played by Alec Baldwin of course, another Capital One pitch-guy) traverse the country to find the person behind the threat and put down their nefarious schemes for good.
Honestly, if that doesn’t sound like the type of drivel Hollywood is already paying good money to develop and put into production I don’t know what does. Maybe I missed my true calling as a mediocre summer-movie script writer.
The world will never know…
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