Seriously, who would have ever guessed that the day would come when I would ever say I wasn't looking forward to buying shoes? But then I got an email last night from Zappos telling me that my account had been hacked and suggesting that I change my password immediately.
This bummed me out because Zappos is definitely one of my go-to sites when it comes to indulging in my shoe fetish and I was just thinking about replacing my favorite old brown leather riding boots when this catastrophe occurred.
So, I went to the site and tried to reset my password so I could get my shop on and then I realized that it would take at least 4-5 hours for me to sign in because they are being swamped with password change requests. Sigh…no boots for me–I mean, not today at least.
Although I’m not that concerned about my Zappos account being compromised (after all, the company assured all members that although the hackers were able to obtain passwords, they were not successful in getting to any secure credit card information), it does bring up some __worries about Internet security in genera__l. With the amount of info out there in the Internet about each of us, it is totally freaky that some random hackers can pry about just about any site and gain all this access to private info. Sure, via Zappos they probably only found out that I’m a size 8 and partial to cute booties, but what if this had been a medical site, or my bank account?! Up to 24 million of us have been affected by this Zappos hack, so it’s not like an isolated incident here.
At risk for Zappos customers are names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, the last four digits of our credit card numbers, and a encrypted version of our website password. To protect yourself, be sure to log on to Zappos as soon as you can and click on the “Change password” button in the top right hand corner. Also, think long and hard about going into any other accounts you may have used the same password for and changing those too. It’s better to be safe than sorry!
Were you hacked as a customer of Zappos? Does this make you more leery of internet shopping?
Image via Zappos.com
