NATS Question in Regards to Affiliate Data
 

I'm not trying to get into the arguments about this that the other threads seem to. I just have a couple simple questions that are more for my own safety (and other affiliates). If anyone at TMM or any NATS sponsors could answer, I'd really appreciate it.

1) Would all the affiliate data of mine be able to be harvested or is some of it encrypted/etc? The information I'm worred about is SSN/FEIN, bank account information, epassporte name, and affiliate password.

2) Will any sponsors be sending out emails regarding this to their affiliates?

Like I said, I don't want to get into the mess that the other threads are, would like to keep this strictly business. My concern would be of course identity theft or other unlawful activities. While I don't think I use my personal SSN on any of my accounts, I'm certain some people do. I'm also certain some people are using the same passwords on their affiliate accounts and epassporte accounts. I don't know what a person could do with my banking information, but I don't really want to find out. As someone who has been a victim of identity theft in his life, I know how little information is really needed by a bad guy to do this. If this information was all compromised, I would hope that affiliates would be informed so that we may change passwords, check credit reports, etc.

Thank you.

I was wondering the same thing, as I'm an affiliate.

If someone has our tax ID, nothing can be done, and frankly I give it to how many program owners I've never met anyways.

As to passwords, I'm now very happy that I use a different random string password for every affiliate program I join, reducing the risk of situations like this.

Using the same password over and over again just isn't smart business.

Basically you should consider all your info that's stored within NATS compromised.

Username and password, address, epass username and whatever else you've had to enter when signing up for a program.

Personally, as an affiliate I'm not too worried about that data - as long as your affiliate password and your epass password aren't the same, you should be fine.

I would also like to know the answers to these very important questions.

Yes with the NATS programs that had this problem (not all did).. A Webmasters account data, all of it, from name, addy, check details, ssn/tax id, icq, referring urls, and of course email address.

It appears they harvested emails and member user/pass details, but again they did have access to everything.

Thanks for the info, that's just lovely.

Glad I never used epass as a payment option on any of my NAT accounts...

Umm.. Heads up for all of you...

90% of all affiliate programs have been compromised in the last 3 years. Pretty much every large program. They just never told you about it. All of your data has been out in the wild for a long time now.