You probably had a Yahoo account. And you probably know that account was hacked. After all, the firm admitted about a year ago that 1 billion accounts had been compromised. Check that…it was actually 3 billion. Every Yahoo account created since, essentially, the dawn of the Internet. What you [Keep reading]
You are probably fully aware that criminals have been selling your user names, passwords, addressees, credit card numbers, etc., in the Internet’s darkest places for a long time. Still, it’s creepy when you see it happen in real-time. Add to that creepy factor this finding from Israeli security firm Sixgill: [Keep reading]
You like a cute dog photo. You click a link to get NCAA basketball scores. You comment on a friend’s new job. You download an app to navigate a conference, or a family wedding. And suddenly you are dropped into buckets like “a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded [Keep reading]
We’ve heard about the identity theft epidemic for so long that many have become numb to the news, and the large numbers — 50 million stolen credit cards here, 150 million stolen Social Security numbers there. But this is no time for complacency. There were two bits of very bad [Keep reading]
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]
WARNING: Zelle isn’t really a safe way to send money. Huh? But it’s backed by all these big banks! Read on… Every time a new payment app bursts on the scene, there’s a fraud learning curve. Companies never emphasize enough how risky the new app is, and consumers always learn [Keep reading]
Mark was getting ready for bed last October when a disturbing notification arrived in his email – there had been a “change” in his credit information, a credit monitoring service warned. Filled with dread, he logged in and found the trouble: a black mark on his credit report, claiming [Keep reading]
Criminals armed with a flood of data stolen in recent data breaches are newly targeting consumers where it might hurt most: their retirement accounts. The lucrative crime of brokerage account takeovers isn’t new, but it appears identity thieves are having more luck recently raiding victims’ retirements, tricking brokers into emptying [Keep reading]
Facebook is having a tough time controlling its reputation for unfairly impacting political events, and this won’t help: the social media giant can make users “like” a political candidate’s page without their consent. It just happened to me. I’m a journalist, so I don’t like any any political pages, unless [Keep reading]
If you think fake news is bad, wait until fake news video becomes a thing. Or until an entire generation of kids hacked by Silicon Valley’s attention-mining tools comes of age. Or until Facebook throws up its hands and realizes it simply can’t stop the Frankenstein it has created. We’re [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan