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eksabajt | 7 years ago

In 2015 I was targeted by scammers who claimed to be from Microsoft and said that I had a virus on my Dell computer. Another graduate student had originally registered the computer with Dell technical support. When the hard drive failed I updated the phone number, but I had overlooked updating the name in the contact info. When the scammers called me they addressed me by the name of the other grad student. I tried to report this breach to Dell at the time, but I didn't get anywhere. Seeing this news reminded me of the incident and I searched to see if Dell had disclosed the breach. I found a few articles from early 2016 where others were reporting similar experiences but Dell was not admitting at that time that they had experienced a breach [1-3]. In May 2016 Dell still claimed that they had "no indication that customer information used in the scams has been obtained through an external attack" [4]. Does anyone know if they ever admitted to the breach? They ought to be sanctioned as well if they failed to disclose.

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/dell-to-customers-report...

[2] https://www.cio.com/article/3020733/security/scammers-target...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/lates...

[4] https://blog.dell.com/en-us/dell-phone-tech-support-scams/

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jjeaff|7 years ago

They're possibly telling the truth. Maybe they weren't breached. They may have just sold their customer list to to one of their "marketing partners" who was either breached or are the crooked actors themselves.