So you’ve been part of a data breach. Now what?
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2024
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Another day, another data breach, am I right? Companies including AT&T, Ticketmaster, and UnitedHealth have all made headlines recently after hackers left millions of customers’ data vulnerable. Lily Hay Newman, a writer covering information security, digital privacy and hacking for Wired, says data breaches like these have been a growing issue for more than a decade. On the show today, Newman explains steps you can take after you’ve been impacted by a breach (beyond signing up for free credit monitoring) and what you can do proactively to protect your data. Plus, what cybercriminals actually do with your data and how cyberattacks have evolved.
Then, we’ll get into how a PAC funded by Elon Musk is collecting information on would-be voters. Plus, we’ll workshop a name for Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic platform and hear about Olympic speed climbing.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “The Sweeping Danger of the AT&T Phone Records Breach” from Wired
- “Ticketmaster Confirms Data Breach. Here’s What to Know.” from The New York Times
- “AT&T says criminals stole phone records of ‘nearly all’ customers in new data breach” from TechCrunch
- “What’s Behind the Increase in Data Breaches?” from The Wall Street Journal
- “Here’s how much your personal information is worth to cybercriminals – and what they do with it” from The Conversation
- “How an Elon Musk PAC is using voter data to help Trump beat Harris in 2024 election” from CNBC
- “Forget Apple, the biggest loser in the Google search ruling could be Mozilla and its Firefox web browser” from Fortune
- “U.S. climber Sam Watson smashes men’s speed world record with 4.75-second qualification run” from NBC Olympics
Make Me Smart is headed to Boston! You can find details about the live event and how to get early bird tickets here.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, |
| 0:10.0 | where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.6 | Kai is on vacation all week and so joining us for our weekly deep dive show is |
| 0:17.5 | marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino. |
| 0:19.9 | Welcome back. |
| 0:21.0 | Hey, so good to be here for a topic that I am very interested in, that I think everyone has some |
| 0:28.8 | experience with, I'm talking about data breaches. Who has not been part of one of these? |
| 0:35.7 | Yeah, I was just talking with Marissa yesterday that I got a letter from Ticketmaster |
| 0:40.5 | over the weekend saying that I too had been part of a data breach. |
| 0:44.1 | I mean, the AT&T one. |
| 0:46.3 | Mm-hmm. |
| 0:47.3 | United Health all have been faced with significant data breaches recently and this leaves millions of customers |
| 0:54.1 | vulnerable I should say they're data vulnerable but we wanted to know what was |
| 0:58.1 | going on with what at least feels to me like a lot more of these data breaches and what if anything |
| 1:05.5 | we can do to protect our data. So here to make us smart is Lily Hay Newman. |
| 1:10.0 | She covers information security, digital privacy, and hacking for Wired. |
| 1:14.7 | Welcome to the program. |
| 1:15.6 | Thanks so much for having me. |
| 1:17.8 | So how, is there anything we can do at this point to protect ourselves from these |
| 1:24.7 | data breaches? Well as you were saying I mean who among us has not received one of |
| 1:31.1 | these letters and there are some things that we can do but I think you know it's |
| 1:38.3 | important to understand what we've all felt which is that a lot of this is out of our control and the types of things that we can do are sort of mitigating or you know taking as many steps as we can from our side but there is no |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marketplace, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Marketplace and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.