14 DAY TRIAL // The owners of Smog Check stations licensed with the Bureau of Automotive Repair (BAR) of the California Department of Consumer Affairs have been notified by the BAR of a data breach in which their bank account numbers and bank routing numbers might have been compromised.
The letters sent out earlier this month inform recipients that an unauthorized party breached the network of a BAR service provider between May 2012 and March 2013.
“To help prevent unauthorized access and fraudulent activity on your account, we recommend that you monitor your account for suspicious activity. If you choose to close your account, contact the financial account issuer and tell them that your account may have been compromised, and ask that they report it as ‘closed at customer request’,” BAR advises.
However, as DataBreaches highlights, the breach was discovered on January 4, 2013.
It’s uncertain why it took the impacted service provider such a long time to detect the breach, and why BAR waited over six months to notify impacted Smog Check stations.