Who got letters from Adobe today?

[Generic Other]

They said we have had our customer order data stolen. Names, payment, card expiration dates, passwords, customer info...

So worse than what they said in email last week when they advised us to change all our internet passwords.

The new letter says go to Experian and sign up for free fraud protection and there's an activation code. OK, so I google Experian for a link and discover a huge story breaking there. They are selling customers social security numbers!

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia), who has a reputation for going after data brokers, has sent a letter to the CEO of Experian after learning that one of the credit bureau's recent acquisitions had sold Social Security numbers to identity thieves. The letter comes after an amazing investigation of a number of surreptitious sales among companies and countries.

KrebsOnSecurity conducted the investigation. Former Washington Post writer Brian Krebs and his readers were able to backtrack from “sourceid” metadata attached to consumer records being sold online. They tracked the data back to an American company, USInfoSearch.com, whose CEO in turn blamed a third company, Court Ventures, with whom they’d signed an information-sharing agreement. (Didn’t you know that everything is hunky-dory so long as you sign an information-sharing agreement?)

Court Ventures “aggregates, repackages and distributes public record data, obtained from over 1,400 state and county sources.” Experian, one of the three major national credit bureaus, gets dragged in here because they bought Court Ventures about a year ago.


http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/10/25/experian_data_broker_social_security_numbers_sold_to_identity_thieves.html

Credit data giant Experian tangled in ID theft case
An investigation of an alleged Vietnam-based identity theft ring has dragged in the credit reporting firm Experian and rekindled a congressional effort to force companies to reveal how they use Americans’ personal and financial data.

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/24/21123472-credit-data-giant-experian-tangled-in-id-theft-case

The scam, revealed in an indictment unsealed on Friday, allegedly resulted in the theft of data for 500,000 Americans, information which was then posted for sale on websites, including superget.info and findget.me. But the indictment made no mention of the source of the data.
So who else has bought Adobe software at their website? What are you thinking? Signing in to your account at this time is not possible. Just the circle spin.

[PoliticAverse]

1. A friend in Canada got the letter a couple of weeks ago.

Some more info on what happened:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/04/us-adobe-cyberattack-idUSBRE99212Y20131004

[Generic Other]

2. Hard to trust the other site to protect us from fraud in light of the news

of the past few hours. Experian. Give us your private data because we won't sell it anymore? There's a comforting guarantee.

[PoliticAverse]

3. Understandable. BTW Experian is doing ID verification for the healthcare.gov website. n/t

[Generic Other]

4. Oh dear

I envision a bunch of Adobe customers who got access codes to complimentary ProtectMyID Alert memberships ending up with ACA coverage instead.

[jtuck004]

7. "No ma'am, you haven't got coverage for the delivery, but if you can get the kid out we can sure add

some spiffy graphics to the birth announcements."

Oh, this has all sorts of great possibilities...

[Generic Other]

8. We can Photoshop the baby

It can look like the mother's side or the father! haha.

[rainy]

5. I got mine a week ago. Nt

[Generic Other]

11. You seem calmer than me

I felt violated. I think I have had to fork over excessive amounts of info to get student/teacher discounts. This included a paystub as I recall. And someone from Asia did try and use my credit card.

Apparently the real scary part is that these hackers are selling full package files with all our aggregated info which allows unscrupulous people to assume our identities entirely. I seem to recall people scoffed at the idea that such a thing could occur a few short years ago.

How long before we are all faced with having to document who we are to prevent rampant identity theft? I am seeing a day when we are forced to provide documentation far more rigorous than the punitive voter ID requirements or risk becoming a non-person! Maybe I am being paranoid, but I do not want a digital doppelganger!!

[Journeyman]

6. And Adobe want us to sign up for "Creative Cloud" so our info is active on their site all the time…

I just went to their site, to see if this latest announcement is different from the one I received last week, and you can't even access the "Customer Security Alert."

When we just bought the program outright, we had options for where to purchase it. You could get it at a brick & mortar and pay cash. Now, Adobe wants us to register our credit card with them and allow monthly payments to be deducted. And this, with a corporation that has proved itself woefully lacking in necessary security.

There are an almost infinite reasons not to want to be involved with Adobe's "Creative Cloud." Their financial incompetence is only the most recent.

[Generic Other]

9. I had already decided that I was not renting their products

They seem a rather greedy company and at some level deserve to have their software out there free to every hacker.

[derby378]

10. This is why I bought Acrobat X from an actual brick-and-mortar store

The "cloud" is not the be-all and end-all of the Internet, no matter what some people might claim. Some of us do insist on an off-line life as well.

[Generic Other]

12. I have used Adobe for years of Photoshop upgrades

I should have just pirated their software. Once again honesty gets me nowhere.