How to tell if you were affected by the Capital One breach

Author: Thomas Franck

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KEY POINTS
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• Capital One issues guidelines on how to shore up account security in the wake of its data breach, which affected about 100 million people.

 

• The recommended actions include receiving activity alerts, reporting suspicious purchases to Capital One and keeping vigilant about possible phishing.

Capital One has issued guidelines on how to determine if your credit card account was affected by the data breach involving more than 100 million people and steps you can take to shore up security.

The company said Monday the largest category of jeopardized data was information on consumers and small businesses as of the time they applied for credit card products from 2005 through early 2019.

The data included personal information the company said it collects at the time it receives card applications, including names, addresses, ZIP codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth and self-reported income.

Beyond that application data, it said, the hacker also gained access to credit card data including credit scores, limits, balances and payment history as well as fragments of transactions data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018.
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About 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers were compromised, according to Capital One.

​Read More: Here