First American Leaks 900 Million Documents
Real estate transactions need your most important info
Your home is your castle, but what can you do when your home insurance company drops the ball and leaks millions of personal documents to the World Wide Web? You better call Wiperts and get on-top of it! First American is being sued right now because it left millions upon millions of homeowners’ information on a publicly accessible website. Unbelievable? Unfortunately, it is indeed true. Anyone with two brain cells could access private information by typing in a URL and changing some numbers around at the end. No doubt, sophisticated scammers set-up a program to skim as much information as possible before the door was shut.
If you’ve ever rented or mortgaged any kind of real estate, chances are you’ve bumped into First American or another similar company. Not all companies are the same, but I’d be willing to bet that other real estate insurance companies are hiring security experts in a flurry. Your personal information includes your name, address, social security numbers, bank accounts, mother’s maiden name, previous addresses, and even your driver’s license. These things are required when dealing with insurance, mortgages, or any big real estate/insurance deal.
If only there was any real punishment for leaking personal information like this. Big corporations routinely get away with it, even though they have enough money to bolster their defenses. Sometimes they just don’t really care about security at all. According to Krebs/CNN, “If a person knew the URL of one document — say if First American sent you a link to a document involved in your real estate loan — slightly tweaking the last few digits of the web address could take the user directly to another person’s sensitive information.” It seems that First American just had private files sitting on a server, directly linked to real estate loans. Imagine a cyber thief opening a file cabinet online and making an instantaneous copy – all without leaving home.
Wiperts aims to stop personal information from being spread online without your consent. Personal information improperly obtained and distributed online leads to identity fraud and theft. If you are a victim of one of the numerous data breaches or simply want to take preventative measures, Wiperts can help you today. Benjamin Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This rings true even in 2019. The best way to stop theft is to prevent it from happening in the first place.
Ask anyone who has been a victim of identity theft, and they’ll tell you a horror story. Identity theft is on a rampant rise and ruins millions of lives every year. The more vulnerable your personal information is, the easier of a target you become. You don’t want to share your own identity theft story one day because you became a victim to criminals. Fight against information theft by hiring an expert service like Wiperts to clean your personal information from the internet. Search engines, social media accounts, and old accounts on chat forums all have tidbits of information that lead fraudsters closer and closer to successfully committing identity fraud.
