Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE) security breach was an order of magnitude larger than the company originally said. Adobe said that personal details, credit card information, and hashed passwords for 2.9 million customers had been compromised in an October 3 blog post, but it turns out that the number is closer to 38 million, reports Radhika Sanghani for The Telegraph.
Adobe wants you to change your password
The hackers also got part of the source code for Photoshop. Proprietary source code is usually closely guarded and is probably quite valuable, though finding a buyer could be a challenge. Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE) recommends that all users change their passwords.
Adobe’s breach: an embarrassment for company
The breach is an embarrassment for Adobe, but it doesn’t really change how secure people’s credits cards or financial accounts are these days (not very). Credit card details for a couple million people might sound like it’s worth a fortune, but the reality is that getting money from a stolen credit card without getting caught is risky, buying goods online using a couple hundred stolen credit card numbers is a great way to end up in prison.
What’s considerably more damaging is identity theft – when someone uses your personal information to create new financial accounts that you don’t know about. Banks have reasonable good protocols for stopping credit card fraud from getting out of hand, but identity theft is much harder to deal with. Monitoring services may be able to help, but it’s important to check your credit rating from time to time to make sure nothing strange is in there. Even if no one has stolen your identity, you might even find an honest error from a previous transaction that needs correcting.
But even with the huge increase in numbers when it comes to incompetence, Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ:ADBE)’s security lapse still pales in comparison to credit reporting firm Experian selling personal information to identity thieves last week. Aside from the fact that Experian apparently hasn’t been doing any checks on the people it sells information to en masse, when agencies tasked with keeping track of our financial accounts are selling Social Security numbers, banking information, and other sensitive data, identity theft is going away anytime soon.
