Hacker Hits 100 Million People in Capital One Data Breach

Another data breach is hitting 100 million people.

As if the Equifax breach wasn't bad enough - now 100 million people have had their credit accounts hacked in the latest breach. Capital One uses "What's in your wallet?" as a tagline. Guess what? There's a Capital One card in my wallet right now. How about yours?

Capital One wants us to be reassured that even though "this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada," we should feel good about the fact that "over 99 percent of Social Security numbers were not compromised."

We're not great at math, but that's still around 1 million social security numbers. 

Oh, it also took them about 4 months to notice the hack.

Capital One Financial Corporation announced that the hacker obtained personal information from people who applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers. It happened on March 22 and 23, but wasn't noticed until July 19.

The FBI arrested and charged Paige Thompson with computer fraud and abuse, in what the the Washington Post is calling "the largest data breaches ever to hit a financial services firm."

The information accessed was mainly from customers and small businesses who applied for credit card products from 2005 through early 2019, including names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.

Beyond the credit card application data, the individual also obtained portions of credit card customer data, including:
*Customer status data, e.g., credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, contact information
*Fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018

No bank account numbers or Social Security numbers were compromised, other than:
*About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers
*About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers

So what do you need to do? 

Capital One plans to notify everyone affected and make free credit monitoring and identity protection available. (Note, my card ALREADY gives me free credit monitoring, so thanks for that.) Customers are also advised to monitor their credit card accounts for suspicious activity.

Learn more at Capitolone.com/facts2019 or call 1-800-227-4825 to speak with a Capital One agent.