In 2015 I was targeted by scammers who claimed to be from Microsoft and said that I had a virus on my Dell computer. Another graduate student had originally registered the computer with Dell technical support. When the hard drive failed I updated the phone number, but I had overlooked updating the name in the contact info. When the scammers called me they addressed me by the name of the other grad student. I tried to report this breach to Dell at the time, but I didn't get anywhere. Seeing this news reminded me of the incident and I searched to see if Dell had disclosed the breach. I found a few articles from early 2016 where others were reporting similar experiences but Dell was not admitting at that time that they had experienced a breach [1-3]. In May 2016 Dell still claimed that they had "no indication that customer information used in the scams has been obtained through an external attack" [4]. Does anyone know if they ever admitted to the breach? They ought to be sanctioned as well if they failed to disclose.

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/dell-to-customers-report...

[2] https://www.cio.com/article/3020733/security/scammers-target...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/lates...

[4] https://blog.dell.com/en-us/dell-phone-tech-support-scams/