Greg's Corner

Recent data breaches can affect your money, health, and privacy!

If you’ve ever been to the East Coast especially the Pennsylvania and South Jersey areas you may be familiar with the convenience store chain Wawa. They recently had a data breach that could have exposed up to 30 million payment cards of its customers. Reportedly, hackers had installed malware into the payment processors at multiple stores at both the register area and their gas pumps. Some of the payment card information has even ended up on the web for sale to malicious actors. If you used a debit or credit card at a Wawa store in the past couple of months you’ll want to keep an eye on your account for unauthorized purchases.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyT4SabnV2w%5D

LabCorp is one of the nation’s largest medical testing companies. They recently had a flaw in their website that allowed 10,000 patient records to be exposed. This information included dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and lab results among other medical data. This is the second breach for LabCorp in the past year as their payment system was exposed back in June which resulted in the compromise of close to 8 million payment records. This latest breach could result in heavy fines for LabCorp under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). LabCorp has said that they will be notifying patients who had their data exposed.

Lastly, it seems we can’t talk about data breaches without talking about Ring. While Ring’s most recent incident may not be a data breach per se, it does show how your information can be put at risk. The internet privacy advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claim they have discovered that the Android version of the Ring camera app sends user information to several third-parties. One of those third-parties is said to be Facebook and it doesn’t matter if you have a Facebook account or not. Some of the information sent to these third-parties include users’ full names, email addresses, and app settings including the number of locations they have Ring devices installed in.