PHOENIX — Massive data breaches affected millions of Americans this month, as growing concerns about the protection of your online personal information.
The Let ABC15 Know Team is cutting through the noise, explaining what you need to understand about these cyberattacks.
The recent data breaches impacted Google and TransUnion.
Nearly 4.4 million Americans had their information exposed in the recent breach.
Ken Colburn, of Data Doctors, says the breach doesn’t directly impact Google and your personal Gmail account wasn't necessarily exposed.
It’s a “tool” that connects Google to a certain type of server, and the same type of problem reportedly happened with the credit reporting agency TransUnion.
Either way, the online criminals took that related data, which was already public information, and used it for ill intent.
Colburn said Google reported that they shut down the misuse quickly; however, the problem is still causing an increased number of phishing attempts.
“You don’t necessarily need to change your passwords on a frequent basis because that creates some other problems; what you need to do is make sure you’re not using on any two sites,” said Colburn.
“When somebody you’re doing business with has been breached, you get an alert of some sort, and you need to change the password for that particular service as opposed to just randomly changing 25, 30, 40 passwords.”
Protect Your Online Accounts
- Take this time to improve your password. Consider changing your 8-character passwords to a 16-character password.
- Use passkeys when possible. Passkeys are things like your fingerprint or face scan to sign into your online account.
- Keep two-step verification turned on. Yes, it may seem like another extra step, but it stands as better protection from hackers.
- Pay attention to messages that claim to be from Google marked “urgent.” These messages may be phishing emails.
- Be alert for more convincing and smarter phishing attempts.
