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Equifax Settlement, Android Video File Exploit, Encryption Backdoors
This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for July 29th 2019 with your host, Tom Eston. In this week’s episode: Details on the Equifax breach settlement, why your Android phone could be exploited by simply watching a video file, and encryption backdoors being requested by world-wide governments.
Can you believe that its almost August and that summer is almost over? I was just in Target the other day and noticed that the school supplies are already out! Once you see that you know the Halloween supplies are also right around the corner. It’s totally crazy! I don’t know about you but I want to plan at least a few more short trips with my friends and family which is my own desperate way to hold on to the last few fleeting moments of summer. So don’t let protecting your digital privacy get in the way of your plans. You should be using a Silent Pocket faraday bag or phone case which will block all wireless signals keeping your devices secure and completely off the grid so you can be focused on your time away. As a listener of this podcast you get 15% off your order by using discount code, “sharedsecurity” at checkout. See Silent Pocket’s full line of products at silentpocket.com today before summer gets away.
Hi everyone, welcome to the Shared Security Weekly Blaze where we update you on the top 3 cybersecurity and privacy topics from the week. These podcasts are published every Monday and are 15 minutes or less quickly giving you “news that you can use”.
Everyone remember the Equifax breach that affected 147 million people? Do you think you may have been financially or otherwise impacted from this data breach? If so, you may be entitled to up to $20,000 for documented breach related expenses or 10 years of free credit monitoring services. You can also collect $125 if you already have a credit monitoring service (which, by the way, really doesn’t do much for you). This news broke last Monday when the FTC announced a proposed settlement that will cost Equifax $700 million dollars which will be the largest settlement related to a data breach in history. Equifax would be required to pay at least $300 million but up to $425 million and provide free credit monitoring for all victims of the data breach. In addition, Equifax will offer free resources for victims recovering from identity theft and six free credit reports for all US consumers starting in 2020. If you think you want to collect on this settlement, you’ll need to file a claim on the official claim site. Check out our show notes for a link to the FTC website which has all the details on where to file a claim. Note that fake sites are bound to pop up so be sure you only use the site linked from the FTC. If you think you may have a case to file a claim you’ll want to move quickly as you’ll only have 6 months to make your claim once the settlement is approved.
So is this settlement too little, too late? Even with the FTC now requiring Equifax to overhaul their security procedures does a fine like this even matter much? Like I talked about on last week’s show the 5 billion dollar fine about to be issued to Facebook for their handling of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook was able to make most of this fine up through the jump in their stock price. I think we will see the same with Equifax but with the caveat that I’m sure security teams internally at Equifax will actually have money now to spend on security personnel and additional security controls including incident response. Are you going to at least make a claim for $125 of this settlement? I’d love to hear your tho
Published on 6 years, 5 months ago