Issue 37.17
Last week news came out about a security breach and a financial security firm that is connected to your information. It may not actually have put your information at risk. Investigators believe about half the people living in the US were not affected, but there is a way to be at least somewhat sure one way or the other.
Equifax is one of three big credit monitoring and ID theft protection companies that almost everyone relies on for credit reports and additional information that is used to approve loans, car and real estate purchases, hiring and many other every day type decisions. A reported 143 million US consumers have information in that affected database including your name, social security number and birth date information. Additionally another 200,000 plus people may have had credit card and driver’s license information compromised.
Internal and external investigations are ongoing on how this happened and to what extent information might have been stolen, but it is another in a long line of recent hacks of large organizations and their information. It is fairly safe to say at this point that your information is not safe anywhere. However, banks, financial institutions and other large corporations are taking steps to avoid such incursions and to help you recover if any of your information is taken.
Other notable hacks recently include Taringa (28 million users), Instagram (6 million users including celebrities, politicians, etc.) and many others. The Hacker News (which I subscribe to) indicates many if not most of the recent corporate hacks have happened because of software developed by the NSA to spy on citizens and foreign nationals. The NSA was hacked a few months back and whoever did it is gradually leaking all the information including the computer programs they developed to access private information.
One of these recently released is called UNITEDRAKE which allows a hacker to remotely take full control over a users Windows computer. It reports back to the hacker anything you do including capturing webcam and microphone input. It can access external hard drives and basically do anything you could do yourself. The name and capabilities of this hack was originally posted in wikileaks by famous or infamous Edward Snowden.
Back to the Equifax leak. It is wise for everyone to check to see if their information is compromised. You can do so by going to https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/potential-impact/ where you can check if they feel you were impacted. To their credit, Equifax is offering free credit reporting and ID protection for everyone for a year, regardless of whether they feel your information was hacked. On the negative side, There are some strings attached, they did not report the breach to the public for six weeks and the Hacker News reports that the three chief executives sold over $2 million of their company stock in the days right after the breach was discovered but before it was reported.
As you can see, it is important to protect yourself. What may not be obvious to some is that, if hackers can take control of your system remotely, they can also destroy your data or hold it for ransom. It is becoming more and more important that you actively protect your information on some type of remote or removed (except when doing the backup) service or device. Remember what we always say – make sure you remember to protect your data, documents, pictures and your computer, phone and tablet by always backing up anything important.
Shaun McCausland has worked in the computer industry for over 34 years, 27 years of it locally with Bits ‘N’ Bytes and Musicomp and currently works as a computer consultant. If you have questions you can reach him at 435-668-7118 or mccausland.shaun54@gmail.com .