U.S. telecom giant Comcast has warned that cybercriminals stole the personal data of more than 230,000 customers during a ransomware attack on a third-party provider of debt collection services.
Comcast says customer data stolen in ransomware attack on debt collection agency
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> Comcast says that 237,703 subscribers are affected by the data breach, with hackers accessing their names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and Comcast account numbers and ID numbers.
> The stolen data belongs to those registered as customers at “around 2021,” Comcast says, adding that the company stopped using FBCS for debt collection in 2020.
Comcast stopped using FBCS in 2020, but FBCS has customer information from 2021? And they retained this information up to 2024?
Also, freeze your credit people, there are basically no downsides because a normal person doesn’t get a hard credit check often enough for it to be a hassle: https://www.usa.gov/credit-freeze
I’m finding myself sharing this link a lot more often lately, really disappointing how corporations are completely failing to protect consumer data, likely due to the fact that they’re not really punished for failing.
Good luck stealing identities of people in collections… Bold move Cotton.
Are you telling me that bottom feeding leeches don’t keep their cybersecurity up to date? Inconceivable!
They couldn’t be bothered to delete the balances of the identities they stole?
Boo.
It won’t matter until we’re old and need to prove we are who we are and didn’t do what they say we did.
So that’s the new collection technique: if you are delinquent on payment, we will have you doxed.
No forgiveness for such individuals and companies, because… they have none for their customers.
Shocking. Companies willing to buy delinquent debt they are unlikely to ever recover because the marks couldn’t pay it back before, so it is not like adding some additional penalty zeros will help that, do a shitty job protecting that data.
That’s Comcastic!
That’s a huge data breach. It’s really concerning how long it took for Comcast to find out their customer data was compromised. Makes you wonder how secure some of these third-party providers really are.
People running for office need to address this issue as it is one of those annoyances that government can help to address. Companies get off with almost no consequences for leaking personal data aside from providing a year of credit monitoring. How many credit monitoring subscriptions does a person need?
Companies should pay restitution to the victims, not fines to the government (which they also don’t have to pay afaik). How about $1,000 to each victim for each incident? At this level, companies will realize that it is far more expensive to have a data breach than to take every precaution to protect data. For some, they may decide that housing consumer data isn’t worth the risk.
That’s another thing, of a company is housing your data to sell to a 3rd party, consumers should have to opt in and they should be compensated for opting in. Of course, a debt collection company needs to have your data to do their job, but in most cases, companies have no business keeping consumer data on hand.
Where can I sign up to sue Comcast?
My information has been leaked by so many different places, I don’t even know anymore. I got a letter addressed to my daughter who is five that her information may have been leaked in a data breach. She’s five and it’s already happened.
Maybe these companies that lost data need to be held accountable.