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Okta, the $25 billion market cap company that handles logins for more than 100 million users, today confirmed it suffered a breach in January via a third party customer support provider. But for some customers who spoke to Forbes, the disclosure was too late and too scant with information. Okta’s admittance came after a hacking crew called LAPSUS$, which extorts its targets after stealing their data and often leaks victims’ information in public forums, claimed it had breached the company. LAPSUS$ had previously claimed to have stolen data from major security companies including NVIDIA and Microsoft, leading both to investigate...

The Illinois Department of Public Health is launching a program called “Vax Verify” that asks residents to verify and download a receipt of their vaccination status, noting that “More and more companies, such as United, Google, Netflix, Morgan Stanley, Saks Fifth Avenue, Ascension Health, and Lyft, are instituting vaccine requirements for at least some of their employees.” Vax Verify will be contracting with consumer credit reporting company Experian, which will use an “identity verification process to gain access to their immunization history.” Experian has lobbied to share consumer data with the NSA, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies. “As more...

Big-three credit bureau Experian is the target of a class-action lawsuit just filed in California. The suit alleges that Experian negligently violated consumer protection laws when it failed to detect for nearly 10 months that a customer of its data broker subsidiary was a scammer who ran a criminal service that resold consumer data to identity thieves.

As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives -- including their Social Security numbers -- in a new national database being assembled by two federal agencies. The Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted an April 16 Federal Register notice of an expansion of their joint National Mortgage Database Program to include personally identifiable information that reveals actual users, a reversal of previously stated policy. Sign Up for the Watchdog newsletter! FHFA will manage the database and share it with CFPB. A CFPB internal planning...

In October 2013, KrebsOnSecurity published an exclusive story detailing how a Vietnamese man running an online identity theft service bought personal and financial records on Americans directly from a company owned by Experian, one of the three major U.S. credit bureaus. Today’s story looks deeper at the damage wrought in this colossal misstep by one of the nation’s largest data brokers. Last week, Hieu Minh Ngo, a 24-year-old Vietnamese national, pleaded guilty to running an identity theft service out of his home in Vietnam. Ngo was arrested last year in Guam by U.S. Secret Service agents after he was lured...

Six days into the launch of insurance marketplaces created by the new health-care law, the federal government acknowledged for the first time Sunday it needed to fix design and software problems that have kept customers from applying online for coverage. The Obama administration said last week that an unanticipated surge of Web traffic caused most of the problems and was a sign of high demand by people seeking to buy coverage under the new law. But federal officials said Sunday the online marketplace needed design changes, as well as more server capacity to improve efficiency on the federally run exchange...

The companies that determine Americans' credit scores are about to come under government oversight for the first time. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday that it will start supervising the 30 largest firms that make up 94 percent of the industry. That includes the three big credit reporting firms: Equifax Inc., Experian and TransUnion. In remarks prepared for a speech Monday, Richard Cordray, the government agency's director, said that scorekeeping by credit bureaus plays such a large role in Americans' financial lives, it requires scrutiny.

Back in April 2008, APRPEH posted: Lifelock Getting Picked. At that time, Lifelock and its over-exposed CEO Todd Davis was at the beginning of a slew of legal issues. Well finally, the Experian case may have hammered the first nail into the coffin of Lifelock. According to the above story, Lifelock's procedure of proactively placing fraud alerts is an "unfair business practice". U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford of the Central District of California ruled that: "Experian clearly incurs costs each time it must process a fraud alert made by LifeLock. These costs include the costs of allocating Experian’s electronic resources...

A mistake on your credit report can cost you literally thousands of dollars, especially in this economy. So what can you expect from a big credit bureau if you ask them to investigate and correct the error? The answer, for many consumers: About 50 cents worth of effort, conducted by offshore workers at third-party firms. That’s just one of the findings from SmartMoney’s investigation into why credit-report errors continue to pop up so frequently—and why consumers often have so much trouble getting them fixed. To follow what one consumer advocate calls an “electronic hot potato,” SmartMoney pieced together a depiction...

Lifelock Getting Picked Since February 2008, Lifelock, the company that guarantees that your identity will not be stolen has been hammered by legal problems. Lifelock charges consumers $10 a month for the privilege of allowing the company to manage your Fair Credit Reporting Act right to a free initial security alert and which automatically opts out a consumer from pre-approved credit offers for six months. The Lifelock website states: LifeLock, the industry leader in proactive identity theft protection, offers a proven solution that prevents your identity from being stolen before it happens. We'll protect your identity and personal information...

Credit bureau Experian is suing the identity theft prevention firm LifeLock, accusing it of deception and fraud in its familiar advertising campaign, which includes a spot in which CEO Todd Davis reveals his Social Security number and then brags about the effectiveness of the company’s protections. In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court on Feb. 13, Experian contends that LifeLock's advertising is misleading and that the firm is breaking federal law in the way it goes about protecting consumers. Lifelock CEO Davis, in an interview with msnbc.com on Wednesday, called the lawsuit baseless and said that Experian is simply...

Experian Abandons Thousands of Consumer Data Records Paper, Computerized Records Left Behind in Office Move By Martin H. Bosworth ConsumerAffairs.Com June 16, 2005 Identity theft doesn't always happen through sophisticated online scams or because of high-tech criminal rings. Sometimes it can be as simple as leaving boxes of documents and computers unattended for months on end. That's what Augie Bogina of Kansas City found when he bought a building formerly occupied by the Topeka Credit Bureau and the Experian credit reporting agency. Inside the building, Bogina found the previous tenants had left "thousands and thousands" of printed documents and many...