Hackers

How safe do you think your information is? Do you use a debt card, credit card, shop online, bank online, or do you use your smart phone to keep up with everything? Hackers are everywhere and so are identity thieves, but this post is going to talk about hackers mainly who eventually do become ID thieves.

Lets think about what happened recently to  Target and Neiman Marcus who at the end of 2013 had been hacked and alot of information about their customers was breached. Recently Yahoo may or may not of been hacked. How many of you, besides myself, received an Error 999 message when trying to log on Yahoo for the past few weeks. I just recently got back on LAST WEEK after several weeks of not being able to. Also in case you have not heard several Bank Of America customers have been getting hit. Someone in my family got hacked and they tried to take all of there money and then some. On the local news several weeks ago it was reported that at a local hospital an office employee walked out with a hospital owned laptop and SOLD it. That is a breach of a federal health law. Imagine all the information about patients that just simply walked out.

Here is the latest stats as of January on the Target and Neiman Marcus attacks.

The announcement follows a breach at Target that could become the largest in U.S. retail history. The discount retailer acknowledged Friday that up to 110 million customers were affected.
"Clearly we are accountable and we are responsible—but we are going to come out at the end of this a better company and we are going to make significant changes," Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel said in an interview with CNBC.
In addition to the 40 million customers of the chain's U.S. stores whose credit and debit card data was stolen during the busy holiday shopping season, hackers lifted personal information -- including names, addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers -- for 70 million customers.
There may be some overlap between the two groups, but Target (TGT, Fortune 500) couldn't say how many were counted twice.
Among those 70 million people might be customers who haven't shopped at Target recently, but whose information was stored in company databases. It was unclear if online shoppers were affected by the personal information breach, and spokeswoman Molly Snyder said only that the information was collected and stored "during the normal course of business."

Neiman Marcus said Saturday it, too, was "the victim of a criminal cyber-security intrusion" involving customers' credit cards.
The luxury retailer said in an online post that it was notifying "customers whose cards we know were used fraudulently after purchasing at our stores." Neiman Marcus spokeswoman Ginger Reeder said she could not say how many customers were affected or notified.
The breaches raised questions about whether other retailers had also been targeted. The news agency Reuters, citing unnamed sources and without naming stores, reported that at least three other retailers in the U.S. had suffered breaches with tactics similar to those used at Target.

So how should you protect yourself. There are several ways to protect yourself from being hacked.

Change ALL of your PASSWORDS either every 30 to 60 days not MONTHS. Always make it as long as possible but not something simple. I use capital letters, numbers and symbols if the company will let you do that. That rule applies to everything you do online that requires a password. DO NOT EVER USE "1234" OR "PASSWORD" AS A PASSWORD. If you do alot of business on your smart phone make sure that you keep your phone locked or just do not do it from your phone I know it is a convenience thing, but I had a neighbor lose his phone and his replacement phone was dropped off at another house and was not found until a week later. Keep a close eye on all your statements and bills if anything weird shows up in our mail or on your account REPORT IT ASAP. It can take up to 5 years or longer to fix ID theft. Keep up with your credit report.

For more information Google hacking protection or go to LifeLock (www.lifelock.com).

*Like, Comment, Share*