{"id":982,"date":"2019-05-25T16:28:01","date_gmt":"2019-05-25T20:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/blog\/?p=982"},"modified":"2024-11-14T10:45:49","modified_gmt":"2024-11-14T15:45:49","slug":"how-bad-is-the-800-million-record-first-american-data-breach","status":"publish","type":"data-breaches","link":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/data-breaches\/how-bad-is-the-800-million-record-first-american-data-breach\/","title":{"rendered":"How bad is the 800 million-record First American data breach?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How bad is the 800 million-record First American data breach and can DeleteMe help homeowers who have their private home and personal data exposed? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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If you have owned a home or currently own in the United States in the last 15 years, it is likely your personal information may have been exposed<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The information that First American has includes social\nsecurity numbers, drivers\u2019 licenses, bank accounts, tax records, and of course,\ndetailed information about who owns homes of exactly what value.  The exposed data appears to go back 15\nyears.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First American is not a credit bureau like Equifax<\/a> (where 150M Americans had their full effected in their data breach in 2017) instead it\u2019s a \u201ctitle insurance\u201d company.  US homeowners are likely familiar with title insurance but if you have never owned a home, it\u2019s a form of insurance that protects a buyer and seller of homes from someone later claiming ownership.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As Wikipedia says, \u201cPrior to the invention of title insurance, buyers in real estate transactions bore sole responsibility for ensuring the validity of the land title held by the seller. If the title were later deemed invalid or found to be fraudulent, the buyer lost his investment.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This, of course, means that title insurers like to collect as many official documents that prove the identity and financial status of homeowners as possible.  Their databases are full of this data because that\u2019s \u201ctheir business\u201d.  Because of the intrinsic nature of the business, title insurers tend to be more concerned with accuracy than with security.  A data breach is a difficult-to-measurable externality in comparison to paying out claims for their insured properties (US title insurers by some estimates pay close to $1bn \/ year in claims these days).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can I find out if my\nhouse was part of the 885 million records exposed?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019ve owned, bought or sold a house in the last 15 years\nin the United States, then there is a good chance the answer is yes.  And if hour house is in the database, then\nit\u2019s likely the other sensitive personal information linked to it is there as\nwell \u2013 drivers license, tax history, social security number, and more.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, First American doesn\u2019t know if the security breach\nwas taken advantage of broadly – by hackers or others looking for this kind of\ninformation.  One problem is that once a\nbig security hole is identified, it can be difficult or even impossible to say\nwith certainty if hackers got it all \u2013 imagine leaving the door open by\naccident and trying to figure out if someone came in and photographed all the\nrooms in your house but left everything untouched.  This is the analogous problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the First American information was found, downloaded and\/or\nscraped by hackers or data brokers, it can lead to anyone being able to buy and\ncombine detailed information about home owners by doing some simple Google\nsearches.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google searches for\nyour home address on Whitepages, Mylife and more<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a hacker or someone snooping around trying to find\ninformation about you Google\u2019s your home address, what typically comes up on\nthe first page are paid results from Data Brokers like White Pages and Mylife \u2013\noffering to sell your personal information to anyone in the world willing to\nswipe their credit card usually for between $5 and $50.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data broker personal\ninformation data laundering<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data brokers buy this information from \u201cmany sources\u201d which\nthey refuse to disclose.  So the way\nthings can happen in a data breach is: 1. Hacker downloads information from\nFirst American, 2. Overseas company buys it from hacker, \u201ccleans it up\u201d so it\nlooks legitimate, 3. US data broker buys it, combines it with their existing\ninfo, and sells it.  If asked, the\nGeneral Counsel of any US data broker will always claim they only buy legal,\nlegitimate information about consumers. \nIn reality, they don\u2019t know.  And\nthey have an incentive to \u201clook the other way\u201d which they all do and they know\nit.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How DeleteMe works to\nremove your personal home info from Google<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DeleteMe<\/a> works by finding and removing consumers personal information from the sources that come up highest and most often in Google searches for your name + home address online: data brokers.  DeleteMe<\/a> finds and removes consumers and homeowners from dozens of top data brokers \u2013 and monitors these all year long to make sure information stays removed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can DeleteMe remove\nyour home address from the internet after the First American breach? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DeleteMe<\/a> has removed over 12 million home addresses already and is the #1 information removal service in the world.  One reason it is popular is it makes sure the addresses of these residences stay off the data brokers advertising them so the results high up on Google just disappear.  Of course DeleteMe<\/a> can\u2019t remove every trace of information about consumers home addresses from the Internet \u2013 nobody can do that.  But subscribing really does create a lower profile and keeps your home address and information linked to it from being super easy to Google.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learn about the First American Data Breach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":5449,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"class_list":["post-982","data-breaches","type-data-breaches","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/data-breaches\/982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/data-breaches"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/data-breaches"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}