A recent Comcast / Xfinity security breach has the entire IT world paying attention, us included. It was discovered that hackers infiltrated Comcast’s internal systems and gained access to 36.9 million customers’ data, including usernames and hashed passwords, sometime between Oct. 16 and Oct 19, 2023. Comcast completed their discovery of the incident on December 6, 2023 and have begun reaching out to their customers with more information. Their report indicates the breached information includes personally identifiable information, including names, contact information, last four digits of social security numbers, date of birth, and secret questions/answers, in addition to usernames and password hashes.
What happened? As best we can tell, this comes from a known Citrix attack named CitrixBleed that was patched in October, but which wasn’t applied promptly by Comcast. Impacted users will include anyone who is an Xfinity customer or who receives their email through Comcast.
The good news: If I.T. Guru manages your email, you won’t be affected by the email breach, since we are not on the Citrix platform and because we take our stance on regular patching very seriously. Still, many of our customers use Comcast as their ISP, either for their businesses or for their homes, and we wanted to make sure this information was shared with you.
What should you do? If you are a Comcast / Xfinity customer, the following steps are recommended:
- Comcast recommends Xfinity customers reset their passwords and turn on multi-factor authentication as an additional security step
- Comcast also advises customers who are part of the breach to check their credit reports and financial statements for unusual or unauthorized activities
- I.T. Guru recommends that if you are using email through Comcast or through your ISP that we work with you on migration to a more secure platform, one that we can assist with managing and which we can apply additional security measures to.
- We recommend that you reset the passwords for any accounts using identical passwords. We know easy it is to use the same passwords for multiple logins (especially for Cornerstone / IDEXX), so use this as your signal to make your passwords unique to each account and more complex.
- Consider a password vault.
Remember, we’re here to be your I.T. Strategic Partner, so if you have any concerns about the Comcast breach or questions about how we can help make your environment more secure, let’s schedule a call!