Yahoo Autos Avis Car Rental Customer Data Stolen
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Almost 300,000 customers had their information stolen in an Avis car rental data breach, as revealed by the company recently. Hackers were able to infiltrate the company’s database, something we see happen far too often these days.
Watch three muscle car drivers race each other right in front of a cop.
According to the car rental business, it became aware of the data breach back on August 5, immediately cutting off access to the unauthorized third party. Affected customers were sent a letter by Avis, reports BGR, so hopefully if you didn’t receive one that means your data is safe, at least for now.
Supposedly, since the breach Avis has worked to strengthen its cybersecurity so the same thing doesn’t happen again. We just hope another data breach doesn’t happen in a different way and believe most people are tired of this trend.
Reportedly, a law firm representing Avis disclosed that what information was captured by hackers varies from one customer to the next. However, it could include a person’s name, mailing address, email address, phone number, date of birth, credit card number/expiration date, and driver’s license number. You know, the type of info someone could use to potentially steal your identity.
To help patch things up after this little incident, Avis apparently is offering customers who had their data stolen one year of free credit monitoring via Equifax. Sadly, services like that are becoming a necessity as pretty much everyone’s personal info has been hacked somewhere at this point.
This news comes as the traditional car rental business keeps shrinking. Ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft are partially responsible for the shrinking of the market, but so are peer rental platforms such as Turo.
On top of that, smaller, less traditional car rental services which cater to certain segments of the market have further squeezed companies like Avis. Something like a data breach might only work to drive even more people to look at alternatives in the future.
Image via Avis Car Rental/Facebook
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