Hey, have you heard about Allianz? The big-name insurance company is in a bit of a pickle due to a data breach where hackers were able to access customer accounts and obtain personal data. This lead to a plethora of class-action suits being filed. If you have ever given, or will ever give a company your information, you definitely want to know about this story, frankly it makes me triple-check!
• Names and contact data
• Insurance policy data
• Perhaps some financial data
It is terrifying that Allianz has millions of customers, have you thought you have information out there in their wrong hands? Yeah no good.
• Investigating what happened
• Engaging with expert cybersecurity individuals
• Offering support to customers that were impacted by the leak of data
They are taking action, which is encouraging, but with a lot of people feeling the data breach could have been prevented at all.
Based on what we know at the moment, here are a few simple things you can do:
If you are a member of the Allianz account, it is a good idea to:
• Be vigilant about your bank accounts,
• Change your passwords, and
• Think about what credit monitoring services you might want.
We must take security very seriously and keep in mind that if a large company such as Allianz can have such a substantial breach then really, everything can be compromised.
In Closing
The class actions against Allianz are an expensive reminder of how important data security is. Companies should protect customer information, and we should be careful too. If you found out your information was compromised, would you know what to do? It's making me rethink all my passwords!
So what happened?
Here's what took place, hackers got data that came from Allianz customer accounts and it includes!• Names and contact data
• Insurance policy data
• Perhaps some financial data
It is terrifying that Allianz has millions of customers, have you thought you have information out there in their wrong hands? Yeah no good.
Why Are People Suing?
Customers are unhappy and they're taking action. The seizures state Allianz:- The average insurance agency should not have used this level of security - it should have done a better job at protecting information with its clients.
- They took too long to tell the people about the breach - some clients weren't told about the breach rapidly enough.
- They made the mess with respect to fraud and/or identity theft risk - the information was stolen and could result in more severe consequences.
How Allianz is responding to this
Allianz has stated that they are:• Investigating what happened
• Engaging with expert cybersecurity individuals
• Offering support to customers that were impacted by the leak of data
They are taking action, which is encouraging, but with a lot of people feeling the data breach could have been prevented at all.
Based on what we know at the moment, here are a few simple things you can do:
If you are a member of the Allianz account, it is a good idea to:
• Be vigilant about your bank accounts,
• Change your passwords, and
• Think about what credit monitoring services you might want.
We must take security very seriously and keep in mind that if a large company such as Allianz can have such a substantial breach then really, everything can be compromised.
In Closing
The class actions against Allianz are an expensive reminder of how important data security is. Companies should protect customer information, and we should be careful too. If you found out your information was compromised, would you know what to do? It's making me rethink all my passwords!
