Iowa Politics with Jeff Stein -- Mon. Aug. 31, 2026

Even they get hacked.

I'm Jeff Stein with today's Iowa Politics Report.

You may have heard Kim Commando mention this story on the radio, but it bears repeating.

Brinks is one of the biggest names in home security.

ADT is also synonymous with security.

It's their stock in trade, literally.

And both got hacked within a few months of each other, exposing more than 10 million people in total.

Lest you think some evil genius wrote computer code and got into those systems, apparently it was just a convincing voice on the phone to company employees who then tried to be helpful and made quite a mistake.

On July 13th, a group called Shiny Hunters phoned Brink's employees and sweet-talked them through a fake login.

They impersonated a company employee and said they just needed help getting into the system.

Once in the system, they took nearly five million Brinks records.

Now Brinks figured it out and refused to pay ransom so the bad guys dumped some 41 gigabytes of data on the dark web.

ADT fell victim to the same stunt in April.

A caller impersonated an employee and got another employee to let them into the system.

That one led to five and a half million people being exposed with 11 gigabytes dumped on the dark web when ADT refused to pay.

By the way, that was ADT's third disclosed breach in the past two years alone.

Now no customer data like social security numbers were included nor were any credit cards, and security alarm systems were not impacted, so if you have an alarm system with them and it goes off, it's legitimate.

Well, this time, that is.

When the folks who pledged to be safeguards of our security are themselves so easily compromised, what confidence should we have in anything like that?

And that's the Iowa Politics Report for Monday, August 31 on Twitter, Instagram, Gitter, Threads and Truth Social at Iowa Politics.

I'm Jeff Stein on News Talk 1540, KXEL.