Marriott announced a hack of their Starwood Hotels and Resorts reservation database. Personal information, credit card numbers and expiration dates may have been potentially exposed in this massive corporate data breach.
Timehop, a popular app for sharing memories, uncovered a security breach that affected the personal data of 21 million users. On July 4, hackers accessed names, email addresses, dates of birth, users’ genders, country codes and phone numbers.
The personal information of about 230 million consumers and the records of 110 million businesses were discovered left unprotected on a publicly accessible server.
The U.S. Congress has made placing or removing a Credit Freeze with TransUnion®, Equifax® and Experian® free for all consumers. The federal Credit Freeze legislation also requires that the three credit bureaus expedite consumer requests to freeze their credit reports.
Despite aggressive efforts throughout the industry to prevent identity fraud, almost 1 million more consumers were victims of ID theft in 2017 than in 2016 – hitting an all-time high of 16.7 million and financial losses topping $16.8 billion, according to the Javelin Strategy & Research 2018 Identity Fraud Study.
Equifax, Yahoo, Verizon, Dun & Bradstreet, Gmail – and even the IRS. These are just a few of the major data breaches that stole headlines, eroded consumer confidence, and put companies and government agencies on high alert in 2017.
