Posted on 09/06/2021 10:08:58 AM PDT by lasereye
Last month, T-Mobile (TMUS), the nation’s largest wireless carrier, was hacked by a 21-year-old American living in Turkey named John Binns. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Binns said he spent about a week rummaging through the company’s servers.
T-Mobile has since confirmed the data of more than 50 million current, prospective, and former customers was stolen in the hack. That includes Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, names, addresses, and dates of birth.
The T-Mobile hack was massive, but not at all uncommon. In 2020, hackers accessed the customer data of 2.5 million customers of alcohol delivery app Drizly (UBER). In 2019, the information for 30 million payment cards used at Wawa convenience stores was stolen through a breach in the company’s payment systems. In 2018, Marriott confirmed cybercriminals stole the information of 500 million guests. And in 2017, credit monitoring bureau Equifax (EFX) was attacked, with hackers making off with the personal data of 147 million Americans.
Those are just a small sampling of hacks from the last few years. To put it bluntly, you, dear reader, have likely already been the victim of a hack.
“The answer is yes, you've been hacked,” NYU Tandon School of Engineering professor Justin Cappos told Yahoo Finance. “Your data, and everyone else's, is probably out there from one data breach or another.”
Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, went even further by saying that for a mere $10 he can buy your mother’s maiden name, your Social Security number, and your current address.
It sounds scary, and it is. But there are ways to protect yourself even if your data is already out there including taking advantage of free credit monitoring services.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
I try to avoid storing my credit card numbers, but autopay is a must for things like cell phone service, utilities etc. that are billed every month.
What kind of boob gives their ss# to a cell phone company?
Or driver’s license number and date of birth?
I never gave mine to CommieCast/xfinity back in 2007 to get upgraded from dial-up modem to CATV.
I believe you need to show credit history unless go with prepaid service
Exactly! I don't surrender the privacy of my ss# to anyone other than banking institutions, my employer or the government.
but autopay is a must for things like cell phone service, utilities etc. that are billed every month.
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Didn’t used to be that way until the USPS mail deliveries became totally unreliable.
In general, the exact opposite is true. The larger a bureaucratic structure is, the more likely it is to contain faults, failures or contradictions which will destroy it.
The government gave up personnel files for at least 22 million veterans in one whack. China has a file on every person in the USA. Blue Cross Blue Shield medical records were not even encrypted so guess who took them? CIA and NSA have most of our records and phone calls.
Just checked with my Electric company to find it’s accounts have been hacked....here in PA.
i had to give my SS# date of birth, and phone number to sign up for gas and electric just this last month
Yep, got my email this morning... Joy.
Just wow. I’ve never done that. I moved here to PA from NJ back in 1990 and they never asked for any of those.
Isn’t it interesting it’s happened over a holiday weekend.
Sept 5th....”FirstEnergy in PA locks online accounts, requires new passwords after hack attempt” As reported in Trib Live. Pittsburgh
Really? Not for us.
Auto pay is not because of unreliable mail.
It’s to make sure they get paid.
It’s to save them the costs of mailing a paper bill
Far down the list is the check got lost in the mail.
It’s my understanding that when Social Security was passed under FDR, it was promised that the SS Number would never be used as a means of general identification. If that’s true, we’ve come along way baby!
I know, as I just changed my password last Friday, to pay my online bill with a CC, with this notice on their site:
“Effective 9/3/2021...
As part of our security processes to help keep your accounts safe, we regularly monitor FirstEnergy’s website and customer online accounts. We recently detected suspicious activity involving numerous unauthorized attempts to log into customer accounts. While the vast majority of these attempts were unsuccessful, we became aware that a number of unauthorized logins were completed.
Out of an abundance of caution, we have disabled all online account access and are requiring our customers to reset their passwords to access their FirstEnergy “My Account.” You will not be able to access your account until the password update process has been completed. To reset your password, enter your username and email address associated with your online profile. You will then be sent a link to complete the password update process with best practices for setting a strong password.
Please visit “Contact Us” on www.firstenergycorp.com if you have any questions or need assistance. “
https://www.firstenergycorp.com/content/customer/log_in.html
My Social Security Card said that on the card in big letters in a box, "Not for Identification."
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