You might have heard by now, that a wide cluster of well-known Americans (including movie and music stars, politicians, and government leaders) have had all of their personal information posted online. The posted information included financial information, SSN, home address, phone number, date of birth.
As reported in depth by KrebsonSecurity, nefarious individuals are taking advantage of free credit reports from the credit bureaus, in order to grab personal financial information of individuals. But in order to get inside of the free credit report, you need other data (SSN, home address, DOB), so there were several layers of security breached.
Being famous makes you a front line target, but all Americans are equally vulnerable. What's worse is, as an individual, there is nothing that you can do about it.
Your personal data -- your address, phone number, criminal (misdemeanor / felony) offenses, SSN, DOB -- are all accessible online for a price, between different services. Got a speeding ticket? It's posted somewhere online. Go ahead and Google yourself. You'll find a dozen+ websites that track your name, address, phone number, DOB and SSN.
You can't stop the leak, because much of the data comes from your own state's /county's / city's databases that are accessible with the right credentials.
You can't stop the leak because, as I mentioned last month in my complaint about efileforbusiness, companies may sell your personal info, without your permission.
So while some of you have gone off the deep end, ranting about losing your privacy to Google, there are entire industries dedicated to tracking your personal information, then selling it to anyone with money, all on the up and up.
No comments:
Post a Comment