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THE BERNARDS-RIDGE CONNECTION
JUNE 2013
D
I
S
ABATO
&
B
OUCKENOOGHE LLC
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A
TTORNEYS AT
L
AW
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4
H
ILLTOP
R
OAD
M
ENDHAM
,
N
EW
J
ERSEY
07945
973.813.2525
www.disabatolaw.com
ONCE MORE UNTO THE (DATA) BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS…
By: David J. DiSabato, Esq., DiSabato & Bouckenooghe LLC
Ever meet a dumb computer hacker? I
haven’t. Hackers are smart. They’re good at
what they do and they are incredibly cre-
ative. Thanks to hackers, no company can
claim that your personal information is
100%
safe. Data breaches are the rule, not
the exception, and you can bet on there
being lots more of them in the future.
There have been dozens of major data
breaches so far in 2013, including Ever-
note, Zendesk, Twitter, The Wall Street
Journal, The New York Times and, most
recently, LivingSocial. Certain data breaches
turn into pretty significant lawsuits, partic-
ularly when the corporate victim is slow to
disclose that it’s been hacked. Think about
it - the sooner a consumer knows that his
personal information has been compro-
mised, the quicker he can protect himself.
In the case of Michaels Stores, for example,
the craft superstore was victimized by a
sophisticated crime ring that used a sneaky
process known as “skimming” to illegally
obtain customers’ debit and credit card
information right off of the PIN pads at
Michaels’ cash registers. Michaels allegedly
waited months to alert its customers of the
nationwide breach.
During that delay, thousands of customers
watched as their bank accounts were
drained and their credit was ruined. Rightly
so, Michaels was sued in a class action by
customers impacted by the data breach.
The class action was recently settled with
Michaels agreeing to reimburse everyone
for any money lost as a result of the breach
and provide credit monitoring for all those
whose card numbers were exposed. By the
way, the “skimmers” were eventually
caught (living large in California no less)
and will now have five years of quiet time
to think about what they did.
At the beginning of April, LivingSocial, the
hugely popular daily-deal website, was
hacked to the tune of 50 million compro-
mised accounts. Although LivingSocial
claims that no credit card information was
accessed, it has confirmed that names, e-
mail address, users’ dates of birth and pass-
words, were all exposed. LivingSocial hasn’t
been sued yet, but it’s inevitable, particular-
ly in light of reports that LivingSocial might
have been using an outdated hashing algo-
rithm to encrypt customers’ personal data.
Although no banking data was accessed in
the LivingSocial hack, a data breach of this
kind exposes customers to significantly
increased risk of identity theft and fraud
through on-line scams such as “phishing,”
“
pharming,” and surreptitious keystroke
logging. Told you hackers were smart,
didn’t I?
So what can you do to protect yourself if
your information has been hacked? The
first thing you should do is change your
information on the compromised account.
If your credit card was stolen, or your cred-
it card information accessed, cancel the
card. Don’t risk your identity being stolen
too. If your username and password with
an online account were compromised, can-
cel that account and create a new one with
a new and different password. And if
you’ve reused your compromised login on
other sites, change it. Don’t use the same
password for every online account that you
have. A data breach on one site can give a
criminal access to everything you do online.
I’m sure we all have days when we wish
someone would steal our identities
(
although sometimes I think mine would be
returned after a week or two!), but try to
stay smarter than the hackers when it
comes to your online accounts.
DiSabato & Bouckenooghe LLC is a con-
sumer protection law firm located in Mend-
ham, New Jersey. For questions or to learn
more, go to www.disabatolaw.com.
www.theconnectionsnj.com
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