What we know -- and you should do -- about the Marriott hack

Marriott disclosed that personal information of its users in its reservation system going back to 2014 had been hacked. And this is around 500 million people affected, which makes it the second largest corporate hack ever, behind Yahoo. The hack happened at Marriott but Marriott owns a bunch of other hotel chains of that St. Regis, Westin, a lot of the brands that people know have been affected by this. September is when they started getting alarm bells and it appears as though they really realized how bad this was just about ten days ago. So now, we're learning about the extent of it. And we're going to probably learn a lot more. What we've found with these access that the first announcement is really the last. There is a lot of information that's been taken. It's not just credit cards and names, it's also passport numbers, it's addresses. It's a lot of personal information that, it's more than we're used to. At the end of the day, this information can be used to steal your identity, it can be used to try and commit scams and fraud. So part of the problem here is that you might end up roped into something and have no idea about it until you get your credit report. If you think you may be impacted, Marriott has a website they've set up and they're gonna start emailing everyone who might be affected, so that's a plus. But there's probably, again, going to be more people affected in the future if this follows the trend of other hacks that we've found in the past. I know it's crazy But scammers actually try to come in here and create fake websites and fake emails of their own to scare you in to thinking you might have been hacked, click their link and then give your personal information to them. So we actually have to be on guard to make sure that when we find out about these things, they're coming from the real source. That means checking the URL on your website whenever you click on a link Making sure that you're double checking all of your information. And again, don't give out your personal information to anyone you wouldn't trust. It's unclear what the legal ramifications for Marriott will be. The New York Attorney General is going to investigate this. And we may find that they're gonna go after Marriott for a lot more than what we typically have. When this is something like a massive breach like this and especially at this scale, it's really hard to tell what's gonna happen to the company itself. It might seem like hackers are getting even more pervasive and you wouldn't be wrong to think that. But it's important to remember that hacking attempts happen every minute of every day all around the globe And that means that we have to be vigilant unfortunately, until the government and the companies get far better at protecting our information.