Fashionistas Victims Of Posh Data Breach

Attention all Fashionistas! If you are a user of the popular social commerce retail site Poshmark, your personal information may have been compromised in a recently announced data breach. Unauthorized access to its servers was announced in early August. The intruders accessed information including real names, hashed passwords, usernames, genders, style and size preferences, email addresses, social media profile information, and city of residence among other information.F

Poshmark is popular enough to attract 40 million users in 80% of the zip codes in the United States, according to its website. It also is hip enough to attract tennis superstar, Serena Williams to its board of directors. So a hit like this certainly serves up concern about personal information being less than adequately protected by businesses. There are some things you can do to prevent yourself from being a victim of fraud, however.

For now, even though it isn’t clear if all users’ information was compromised, it is recommended you change your password for Poshmark. Be sure to include upper and lowercase letters, a number or more, and at least one special character--more is better.  Also, don’t use personal information in your passwords and be sure each one is unique to each site you log into.

If you have connected your social media account to Poshmark or used another login on Poshmark, such as Google or Facebook, that information is also vulnerable if a breach occurs. So, just don’t do that. Take the time to create an entirely new account with a unique password. If you did use another account to login to Poshmark, you should change that password too.

Also, any time multi-factor authentication is offered for an online account, use it. If you do, you give your accounts a little bit of additional protection against unauthorized logins.

Poshmark also noted that preferences for email and push notifications were included in this accessed data. If you see a push notification on your phone or email that involves Poshmark, review it very carefully to ensure it’s legitimate before clicking on anything. It’s possible that those with less than good intentions will use the stolen information to send out phishing lures that can cause you a lot more discomfort than a tight pair of pants.