Exactis Data Breach: how could it affect you? What is a data breach? How does the Exactis data breach happen? Let’s find out.
What is Exactis?
Exactis is a big data company. Their main office is in Florida, United States, and founded in 2015.
Exactis collects data for companies and buyers.
They use data for promotion purposes.
Additionally, Exactis have universal data storage. Reports say that it stores billions of consumer, business, and digital records. They update it monthly.
How Exactis gather information?
They use cookies to gather information. Hence, cookies are text files. It can store small pieces of data.
The data may include a username and password. It can identify the computer used in browsing. Thus, remember information or record browsing activity.
Additionally, these files help save user’s activity on the website. It then will contain more information about the user’s surfing habits.
Likewise, it can also link your mobile phone to your laptop. Other companies also use cookies. Like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
How does the Exactis data breach reveal?
Exactis data breach happened in June 2018. A security researcher test out the security of the used database type.
The researcher uses a search tool called Shodan. It opened thousands of databases.
It is not protected. One of those is from Exactis.
Furthermore, it exposed 340 million records.
These records were:
- email addresses
- home addresses
- phone numbers
- habits
- the number, ages, and genders of their children
Legal action was filed against Exactis. They fail to protect millions of members’ personal information. They will pay for recovery and relief from damages.
How could Exactis data breach affect you?
Millions are facing trouble because of the data breach. Criminals online can steal this information. Use it to imitate their victim.
Thus, it will be easy to access personal stuff. Like, credit cards, bank accounts, and other important things.
They can use it to make fake accounts. Also, mislead people on their contact lists. They can fool their family members with their plans.
How can we protect ourselves from a data breach?
Monitoring social media account can help to check unfamiliar activities. They need to check bank accounts and credit reports.
Consumers may get a free copy of their credit reports. They can also subscribe to identity and credit monitoring help. It will give an alert if someone uses your personal information.
For instance, you can prove criminal activities. Kindly report it right away to Federal Trade Commission. You may prepare a theft report to give to authorities.
Hence, we all have the right to choose what information we will give. We can limit what sites we will allow gathering data. Also, to refuse what they may ask from us.
Privacy plugins can help. This will warn us of strange sites. It will guide us by asking our permission before getting our data.
The safety of our personal information is a must. It includes changes in our password and addresses.
Quality is important in choosing protection services. So we could ask from experts which service we will use. Some companies have identity protection insurance as part of their benefits program.
