HOUSTON, TX – Are you a victim of the AT&T data breach?
If you DON’T know, here’s how to check.
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If you DO know, here’s what you should do right now, according to Houston cybersecurity expert, Tim Howard, managing partner at Fortify Experts.
CHANGE PASSWORDS
Howard: Change your passwords. Not just on your AT&T account, but I would go and change, your passwords on all of your financial accounts; any account that’s related to credit cards or banking information.
When a data breach like this happens -- and it’s happened to many major corporations -- here’s one of the reasons we need to be aware of these major breaches. If you shop at a certain store or use something like AT&T and they get breached, the cyber criminals take that data, stick it on the dark web, and sell it to the highest bidder. What they’ll usually keep is your name, your email, and your password. And so if you reuse your information, like your passwords on different accounts, then these cyber criminals can come in and actually start just going to the common banks, using your password and seeing if they can login.
MAKE SURE YOUR PASSWORDS ARE UNIQUE
Howard: Use the password generator that’s got this huge crazy password on there. Use it over and over. And if there’s a breach like this, just go back and hit reset password. Don’t try and overthink it too much.
We need to stop using passwords that are cute or that we want to use a specific password because maybe it’s a school we went to, or it’s a pet that we have, and we put a number and a couple of things on there, and then it’s like, it’s such a good password that we reuse it over and over.