What happened?
Apollo, a company that provides sales engagement solutions to its clients, recently confirmed a massive data breach – first discovered in July 2018 – affecting over 200 million of its contacts. Hackers gained access to Apollo’s prospect databases to steal names, job titles, employers, social media handles, phone numbers, email addresses, and other business contact information.
Scope of the Data Breach
The start-up serves over 200 million contacts at 10 million companies, a report from Tech Crunch said. Luckily, the Apollo breach did not involve highly-sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as Social Security numbers, login credentials, or financial information.
Apollo declined to answer questions surrounding the notification and investigation of this breach. However, Apollo’s founder and chief executive officer, Tim Zheng, noted that the breach investigation is ongoing and that the company has reached out to affected customers.
Take Action – Secure Potentially Affected Data
Even though sensitive information, like Social Security numbers and financial information, were not exposed, hackers can use your public information in social engineering scams and other targeted future attacks. Follow these three tips below to secure your information:
- Update email and social media account passwords. Be on the looout for potential phishing scams or other social engineering tactics such as direct messaging scams with malicious links or attachments designed to capture personal information, cause harm to your device or retarget you for fraud and identity theft.
- Consider placing your phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry. Criminals may use your phone number for future scams and other identity crime-related attacks.
- Monitor the dark web. Although no one can erase your data from the dark web, you do want to know if it’s been found so you can take action to protect your accounts, monitor your credit, and reduce your odds of identity theft.
