Hacked Again One thing I am really getting sick of is the number of times hacks are hitting places where I have accounts. Recently I received a warning letter from Amazon when I tried to go on. I wanted to change my email and was told since I had a Yahoo email account, they were checking to see if it was me who was trying to make the change. I thought this kind of odd until I found out they had been hacked. I didn’t know this, but someone who should know said the site was under attack for years and yet it looks to me like they never knew. They sent me an email which stated I had to either accept or deny the fact it was me trying to make the change, which I did. That was when the bigger problem happened. By answering the letter, it brought up a screen on Amazon saying something to the affect I had to click a link on it and then I could proceed. I clicked the link but then everything froze. I contacted Amazon and they were very understanding and the representative tried to walk me through several solutions and this took an hour and by then I was getting very tired since I had spent the day changing the email address I had been using with vendors. Finally, after trying several things like clearing the browser history and such, I told her I was too tired to proceed any further. It is amazing how much trouble it is on some sites to change your email address. On some it was a piece of cake, but on others they made you go through hell. I know they want to be careful with people’s accounts, but some just went too far and in such a way it really didn’t contribute to any more safety. Think about this, when an email is hacked, why would you want a company to then send your supposed secret information to it. I am talking about things like your new information? That is what many of them wanted and did. If someone has access to your email which was hacked, they can track what you are doing and this defeats the purpose of the change of email. I don’t know for sure but I heard just recently many big name sites had been successfully hacked and millions of accounts stolen. If I had to give the best advice I could about this to others I would say change your passwords and email accounts. Having said this anyone with a lot of accounts can expect this to take days and will meet with about 95% success. There are always a few places where you will need technical help with doing this. For example, one site I went on allowed most things to be changed and updated except email addresses. This really puzzled me. Another site only had limited account information you could change and none of it was relevant to what I wanted to do. When you encounter something like this you are forced to contact the site for help and sometimes it is by email and takes days for a reply. I was able to solve the Amazon problem on my own. I tried a different browser and loaded the same letter from Amazon into it. I then clicked the accept field in the letter and lo and behold when I went back to Amazon and clicked the accept link in what had formerly been the frozen page, everything worked again. It was all very strange. I have mentioned this before, but I have been the victim of hacked accounts many times. The VA lost a laptop on a subway train years ago which had the accounts of millions of veterans on it. A bank I was formerly with lost the account information of millions of people and a variety of stores lost my personal information to attacks. This is why I have to laugh when we are told to protect our information, as if we had any say in how it is protected by others. Sometimes our information is lost due to incompetence just like the incident with the VA laptop. What was this laptop doing out of the VA offices? When some of the situations with the stores were researched it was found in some cases our data was not protected at all. In some others it was protected just by simply using a password and not high power encryption. When we look at our lawmakers in Washington D.C. for help, we never see them making laws which would punish companies who don’t protect our data adequately, and on top of that some companies have our data without permission. Just look at the companies who decide what our credit rating should be like TransUnion and the others, did you ever tell them it was alright for them to collect your personal data, I know I never did? Equifax one of the big three credit bureaus was hacked. They lost 143 million records of people including their Social Security numbers according to HackRead. It was called an inconvenience. It is easy to take things lightly when the records lost all belong to other people or when you have powerful connections which allow you to fix your personal problem quickly. When you are just an average person like most of us, this sort of thing can haunt you for years and even cost you money. This was not the first data breach for credit bureaus. Previously Experian had suffered a data breach in which about 15 million accounts belonging to T-Mobile uses had their personal information compromised. One would think the government would try and fix this problem. They are always drawing up regulations for everything else, how about for criteria for protecting our data. Maybe the answer is no company can save our data. It might be inconvenient for us and take us a little longer to do a transaction, but it would stop these data breaches. The exceptions being Doctors, Hospitals, banks and pension systems. Very high standards of protection should be put in place for these places and updated consistently. As better systems of protection become available the systems in place should be updated. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am just very tired of having to try and fix the damage done because others have my private data and are not protecting it very well. Come on Congress, do you job you are supposed to represent us.
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