Hi Guys,
Please see below the details of three massive data breaches. Have you ever used any of these services?
PaySystem.tech (unverified) – 1,410,764 breached accounts
In mid-2022, data alleged to have been sourced from the Russian payment provider PaySystem.tech appeared in hacking circles where it was made publicly available for download. Consisting of 16M rows with 1.4M unique email addresses, the data also included purchases and full credit card numbers and expiry dates. The data could not be independently attributed back to PaySystem.tech and the breach has been flagged as “unverified”.
Activision – 16,006 breached accounts
In December 2022, attackers socially engineered an Activision HR employee into disclosing information which led to the breach of almost 20k employee records. The data contained 16k unique email addresses along with names, phone numbers, job titles and the office location of the employee. Activision advised that no sensitive employee information was included in the breach.
ApexSMS – 23,246,481 breached accounts
In May 2019, news broke of a massive SMS spam operation known as “ApexSMS” which was discovered after a MongoDB instance of the same name was found exposed without a password. The incident leaked over 80M records with 23M unique email addresses alongside names, phone numbers and carriers, geographic locations (state and country), genders and IP addresses.
Please take the following actions if you have ever used one of these services
Change your password and make sure your new password is at least 10 characters long and contains an upper case, lower case, number and a symbol. You can even use a modified phrase or a line from a song if that helps you remember.
Make sure you do not use the same password twice as this leaves you vulnerable to credential stuffing.
Find a good password manager tool to help you remember all of your passwords. Some of our users say that 1Password is a good tool.
Check out Incognito’s Email Hack Check tool. All you have to do is enter your email address and we will tell you instantly if it has been involved in one of the many data breaches that happen every day.
Please let me know if you need any help in relation to this.
All the best,
Max Roberts,
Incognito Privacy Care Team