The big car rental company Avis is telling hundreds of thousands of people that their driver’s license numbers and personal information were stolen in a cyberattack in August.
The company based in New Jersey said in a data breach notice sent to several U.S. attorneys general over the past week that it found hackers in one of its business applications on August 5 and worked to stop the two-day-old unauthorised access.
Avis didn’t say what kind of cyberattack it was, and there are still not many information available about it. An email to Avis asking for a word on the cyberattack did not get a response.
The car rental company told Iowa’s attorney general about the data breach late last week. They said that customer names, mailing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, credit card numbers and expiration dates, and driver’s license numbers were taken. We still don’t know why Avis kept this private customer data in a way that made it easy for someone to get to.
A document filed with Maine’s attorney general on Monday showed that the Avis data breach has affected a total of 299,006 people so far. A separate filing with Texas’s attorney general said that 34,592 people from Texas were touched, making it the state with the most affected residents.
More warnings of data breaches will likely be sent to the other solicitors general in the next few weeks. We don’t yet know if the number of people whose information was stolen by Avis will grow.
Avis owns the Budget car rental and Zipcar car-sharing brands. The company’s most recent full-year earnings report, released in February, says that Avis has more than 10,000 rental sites in 180 countries. Avis made $12 billion in sales in 2023, and Chairman and CEO Joe Ferraro was paid a total of $10.2 million from the company.
It’s not clear who at Avis is in charge of the company’s protection.
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