Are you safe as an Adobe user? Adobe announced earlier this month that up to 2.9 million customers had their “encrypted” credit card information hacked. As a response to the situation, Adobe sent notifications to both the customers and their respective banks.
Is the Encrypted Personal Information Coming Back to Haunt You?
Despite assurances and measures taken by Adobe, how sure are you that your hacked “encrypted” information would not bring harm? When you store credit card information on a website, it must meet Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards. To secure it, companies use long and difficult to crack keys that should be protected for years.
Security experts said that the information remains safe depending on the security measures done by Adobe. If the hacked information was properly encrypted, it would take years and even centuries before they could be used by hackers. This means that, unlike decrypted information, your encrypted data cannot be immediately used to make unauthorized purchases.
Did Adobe Encrypt Your Personally-Identifiable Data?
Credit card information encryption is usually performed by legitimate websites to store your payment information. However, less sensitive details like physical or email addresses may not be protected. These can be leaked, and then sold to spammers.
According to Pravin Kothari, CipherCloud (cloud encryption solutions provider) founder and CEO, some companies do not encrypt these details. Thus, information like your password prompts may be vulnerable. Adobe did not clarify whether the personally identifiable information of their customers were decrypted.
What Could Happen Next?
As a response to the risks of exposing personal identifiable data, Adobe suggested that customers have to change their passwords. As for Adobe customers who are worried about their credit card information, they can report any issues linked to this compromised data by contacting their respective banks. Meanwhile, one-year membership for monitoring credit is also offered by Adobe to their US-based customers.
Source: Forbes
