While you were busy worrying about health insurance premiums and perhaps Donald Trump’s latest Tweet, the U.S. Senate spat in the face of American consumers this week. In a 50-50 vote that required Vice President Mike Pence to break the tie, the Senate voted to nullify a pro-consumer rule that [Keep reading]
NOTE: I’m doing an ongoing series of stories on elder scams, a “tsunami” of crimes hitting the most vulnerable Americans, according to the FBI’s Debbie Deem. Recently, I wrote about the tragic story of a California teacher found murdered in Jamaica. I also wrote about Deem for CNBC.com recently (Click [Keep reading]
Belgian researcher Mathy Vanhoef announced some rather brilliant research on Monday which demonstrates that nearly all Wi-Fi in use today can be hacked. The tool for scrambling data as it’s transmitted wirelessly between your gadgets and routers, called WPA2, can be tricked into coughing up the secrets needed to unscramble [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]
I’m as tired of “hold my beer” jokes as you are, but this news seems to beg for one. While Equifax CEO Richard Smith was saying very little about his former firm’s massive hack during a three-hour hearing before Congress yesterday, Yahoo (now, called Oath, and part of Verizon) quietly [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]
A few Mac laptop users say they have recently been victims of a rather simple ransomware-style attack that disables their gadgets. The attack relies not on installation of ransomware, but rather turning a user’s “Find My iPhone” against them. Find My iPhone is an incredibly useful feature that has rescued [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]
Bob Sullivan