Thieves started to exploit credit card data stolen in Equifax cyber-attack

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The data stolen in the huge Equifax cyber-heist is now being used by thieves, as the credit card fraud registered a significant spike in August, according to The New York Post. Experts claim that these two occurrences are definitely related and we shouldn’t be surprised if the spike continues to grow!

“We saw a 15 percent increase in the overall fraud attempts in our system in August, which is an unusual time of year to see such a spike,” said Liron Damri, co-founder of Forter, a fraud prevention service for online retailers.

Basically, the majority of online fraud surges occur during the holiday season, but this isn’t necessarily a rule.

It started a few months before the actual discovery

Starting with May, Equifax was the victim of a cyber breach that compromised the data of 143 million Americans, but the hack was discovered just in July. Eventually, the hackers figured out that they were exposed, so they dumped the financial data, in order to monetize it.

For those who are not familiar with the matter, the company’s database was breached due to a vulnerability on its website, therefore exposing personal information of users from the United States, as well as the UK and Canada.

By exploiting this, hackers acquired names, social security numbers, as well as birth dates, home addresses and drivers’ license information.

After this, more than 209,000 consumers had their credit card numbers, including rewards credit cards, travel credit cards and many other types exposed.

Equifax is taking all the measures

If you were among those who were exposed, you will soon receive postal mail, in order to confirm this. If this doesn’t happen, it’s strongly recommended to visit Equifax’s website, in order to find if your data was revealed.

Until now, the company’s representatives declared that they’re expecting the breach to last a lot longer. Most likely, it could go well into 2018.

“We have never seen such a massive breach as this,” said the same Liron Damri, from Forter.

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