A data broker (also known as an information product company) is an organization that makes money by collecting your personal information, analyzing it, and licensing it out to be used by other companies for things like marketing purposes.
Data providers gather data from many different sources to create a profile of who you are. This profile includes things like your interests, hobbies, demographics, and even the products you use. Generally, data broker companies only deal with customers to collect information. A few of the top data brokerage companies are Epsilon, Acxiom, and Experian, but there are many data brokerages worldwide that make a hefty profit from aggregating and distributing consumers’ personal data.
Read more…
Source: McAfee
Related:
- JD Sports hit by cyber-attack that leaked 10m customers’ data
January 30, 2023
The fashion retailer JD Sports said the personal and financial information of 10 million customers was potentially accessed by hackers in a cyber-attack. The company said incident, which affected some online orders made by customers between November 2018 and October 2020, targeted purchases of products of its JD, Size?, Millets, Blacks, Scotts and Millets Sport brands. Read ...
- LastPass owner GoTo says hackers stole customers’ backups
January 24, 2023
LastPass’ parent company GoTo – formerly LogMeIn – has confirmed that cybercriminals stole customers’ encrypted backups during a recent breach of its systems. The breach was first confirmed by LastPass on November 30. At the time, LastPass chief executive Karim Toubba said an “unauthorized party” had gained access to some customers’ information stored in a third-party ...
- US authorities release asylum seekers after leaking their data online
January 23, 2023
Nearly 3,000 immigrants seeking asylum in the United States have been released from custody after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials inadvertently published their personal information online. Records including names, birth dates, nationalities and detention locations of 6,252 immigrants were posted to an area of ICE’s website normally used to report detention statistics last November. Further ...
- Hacker finds copy of TSA no-fly list on exposed cloud storage
January 22, 2023
A copy of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s “no-fly list” has been found by a Swiss hacker exposed on the open internet in yet another case of misconfigured cloud storage. First reported by The Daily Dot, the exposure of the database was found by a Swiss hacker known as “maia arson crimew” on a server run ...
- LAUSD says Vice Society ransomware gang stole contractors’ SSNs
January 20, 2023
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest school district in the United States, says the Vice Society ransomware gang has stolen files containing contractors’ personal information, including Social Security Numbers (SSNs). LAUSD also revealed that the threat actors were active in its network for over two months, between July 31, 2022, and September 3, 2022. Read ...
- 37 million T-Mobile customers hacked in data breach
January 20, 2023
T-Mobile said a “bad actor” accessed personal data from 37 million current customers in a November data breach. In a regulatory filing Thursday, the company said the hacker stole customer data that included names, billing addresses, emails, phone numbers, dates of birth, T-Mobile account numbers, and information describing the kind of service they have with the ...