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NextAdvisor Identity Theft Protection Blog Headlines

Texas company uses shredded checks as packing material
While there are many proactive steps that consumers can take to help mitigate the risk of identity theft but, unfortunately, there is no way to prevent companies from making bad decisions on how they handle their customer’s personal information. Take the video below as a case in point. A small Texas specialty foods [...]

Avoid data breaches - encrypt your Gmail!
Google recently created an option for Gmail users to ensure that their email is securely encrypted using SSL. All you have to do to permanently encrypt your email is go to your Gmail settings page and, next to “Browser connection,” select “Always use https.” When viewing your Gmail, check the address bar. If it says [...]

Data Breach Alert: Countrywide financial analyst stole data
Early this month, a former Countrywide senior financial analyst was arrested for stealing and selling Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information for up to 2 million mortgage applicants over a two year period. Rene L. Rebollo Jr. was working at Full Spectrum Lending, Countywide’s subprime lending division. According to the FBI, Robollo confessed [...]

Data Breach Alert: Princeton Review accidently publishes personal data and te...
When switching servers in June, the Princeton Review accidentally published names, standardized test scores, birthdays, ethnicities and other personal information for about 34,000 public school students in Sarasota, Florida. For seven weeks, this data and many other sensitive documents were available to anyone typing in a fairly simple web address, as well as through search [...]

Identity Theft 911 releases a new study on identity theft in California
Identity Theft 911, an identity theft protection provider, released a new study this week detailing the impact of identity theft in California. The study includes some interesting statistics, such as: Nearly 1.5 million Californians were victims of identity theft in 2007 Identity theft cost Californians an estimated $749 million in out of pocket expenses in 2007 Californians spent [...]

Data Breach Alert: Wells Fargo notifies 5,000 to 7,000 people that their data...
Sometime in May or June, a Wells Fargo bank employee access code was used to steal thousands of Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver’s license numbers and, in some cases, credit card numbers. Only a small number of the impacted individuals were actually Wells Fargo customers. Wells Fargo has sent letters to most of the [...]

Smart phones are the newest target for hackers
According to a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, smart phones are the latest online security risk. BlackBerrys, iPhones and other personal devices that connect to the Internet are rarely protected by firewalls or security software. Not only can hackers use spyware to read your emails and text messages, they can also track your [...]

Stores neglect to inform customers of credit card breach
Last week, federal prosecutors revealed that an international ring of hackers had stolen more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers from nine different retailers. Apparently, many of those retailers failed to inform their customers about the breaches, despite laws requiring them to do so. More than 40 states legally require companies to disclose [...]

Identity Truth launches exclusive 30 day free trial; Earns 5 star rating
We have always thought very highly of the Identity Truth identity theft protection service and its use of cutting edge technology to help detect identity theft at the earliest possible moments. Just about the only thing we didn’t like about the Identity Truth service is that they didn’t offer any type of risk free [...]

Data Breach Alert: Hundreds of thousands of computers infected by Russian hac...
A group of hackers, likely based in Russia, may have infected as many as 378,000 PCs over a 16 month period with a software program, called Coreflood, that could extract significant amounts of personal information from the computer owner. The attack was targeted against large corporations and government agencies. Most corporate or government networks are [...]