If you receive an unexpected deposit from the IRS into your bank account in the next few weeks, don’t celebrate. You are likely a victim of a nasty, ingenious new form of ID theft designed by criminals to evade updated IRS security protections. In other words, in this cat and [Keep reading]
He is a master of the simplest “hack” of all — impersonation. In recent months, he has pretended to be White House officials like Jared Kushner and Reince Preibus or even Eric Trump. And it worked. He fooled plenty of people who should have known better, including Anthony Scaramucci, former Utah [Keep reading]
Why do these hacks seem never ending? Why don’t more firms require two-factor authentication? What is the latest on the Equifax hack? While I was in Washington D.C. for the hearings on Equifax, Adam Levin and I appeared in-studio at WTOP to talk with host Dimitri Sotis. Meanwhile, here’s more [Keep reading]
Former Equifax CEO Richard Smith answered questions for three hours before Congress on Tuesday, but offered little new information for consumers concerned about perhaps the most important hack of personal information in America’s history. Smith took questions about the failure to install a security update that would have stopped the [Keep reading]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Former Equifax CEO Richard Smith, in a witness statement released prior to scheduled Congressional testimony on Tuesday, apologized to consumers for the recent hack that exposed up to 143 million consumers to identity crimes, calling the incident “our worst fears…come true.” “We at Equifax clearly understood that [Keep reading]
There’s lots of juicy details about the Equifax hack in a story published today by Bloomberg. It makes the strongest case yet that the massive heist of American SSNs was probably pulled off by a nation-state. That’s likely true about the huge theft of federal employee data back in 2015, [Keep reading]
Equifax CEO Richard Smith left his job Tuesday, becoming the second high-profile CEO in recent years to be ousted after a blockbuster hack. While Smith wasn’t immediately replaced — as his security executives were — he apparently could not survive the firm’s bumbling response in the hack’s aftermath. Word of [Keep reading]
If you wanted a vehicle car tag or a license in Montgomery County, Ala., this week, you were out of luck. Hackers knocked many county computers offline with a ransomware attack, local officials say. The probate office took the worst of the attack, which hit late Monday, so business licenses, [Keep reading]
Many Americans are learning the words “security freeze” recently, courtesy of Equifax. Really, they should be thanking their state lawmakers and a tireless group of consumer advocates. More important, it should give people new appreciation for the disaster that is the legal maneuvering called “state pre-emption,” and why consumers should [Keep reading]
I’ve been telling victims of the Equifax data hack (everyone?) to sit tight and not do ANYTHING because I don’t want people paying money for the WRONG thing. (Like this person I wrote about today). Also, I think eventually the RIGHT thing is going to happen, and people will have [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan