Do you have an account with the giant financial services firm Capital One?
If so, there’s a good chance that some very sensitive information about you was recently compromised in a massive data breach.
Yesterday Capital One published this press release detailing the incident.
You can read it for yourself to get all the details, but here are the most important takeaways from it:
- Approximately 100 million people in the US and 6 million in Canada were affected.
- Approximately 140,000 Social Security numbers were compromised.
- Approximately 80,000 linked bank account numbers were compromised.
The breach also included the following personal and financial information:
- Full Name
- Mailing Address
- Phone Number
- Email Address
- Date of Birth
- Self-Reported Income
- Credit Score
- Credit Limits, Outstanding Balances and Payment Histories of Credit Card Customers
As you can see, this was one of the most invasive data breaches in history.
Capital One did say that no credit card account numbers or usernames and passwords were compromised, but that’s little consolation given the broad range of data that was included in the breach.
It’s believed that the person alleged to have stolen all this data was arrested before she had the opportunity to use or sell any of the stolen information, but that’s far from certain at this point.
Bottom line: If you were one of the 100 million Capital One customers that were affected by this breach, Capital One will be contacting you ASAP to let you know about it.
They’ll also be providing you with instructions for signing up for the free credit monitoring and identity protection services they’re making available to all affected customers.
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