Sometimes it feels like you can’t turn your computer on without seeing news of yet another data breach. One of the latest victims is Polar, the smartwatch company responsible for gadgets like the Polar Pacer Pro and the Polar Vantage V3. Fun fact: Polar is also one of Henry Cavill’s fitness trackers of choice.
The attack started over a week ago. On October 11, Polar posted a statement to its website about a “security incident” that affected its online store. According to the statement, the U.S. online store had been “subjected to various levels of disruption,” but only a few accounts had been compromised. That’s good news, as the attack was likely designed to try and make fraudulent purchases, but not steal health data.
Polar stated: “The data breach has affected only a small portion of customers in Polar’s U.S. online store. The breach does not apply to any other customer data stored by Polar. We want to emphasize that the data of Polar Flow users has not been compromised during the attack.”
The company also said that users don’t need to take any action. Anyone with a compromised account has already been contacted.
Polar says the hows and whys of the attack are still being investigated. Until the company has answers, all login and registration functions of the online store have been shut down. That doesn’t mean the store isn’t usable — you just need to check out using a guest account. You’ll just have to wait a little while to log into your store account.
Attacks like this can be unsettling, especially because they circumvent any preventative measures you can take on your end. Two-factor authentication doesn’t mean much when bad actors can pull the info straight from a database. Thankfully, it doesn’t look to be that bad this time.
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