If you are a COX Communications customer in the US, listen up.

For the last 5 months, COX has been printing our "private" PINs on our bills. If you picked your PIN, and it is not unique to COX, your PIN for other things (garage, credit cards, etc.) is now compromised, unless you still have (or did not shred) all the printed bills going back to Nov 07.

If you never selected a PIN with COX, they "randomly" chose a pin for you. According to the COX PIN Security Standards as seenhttp://www.cox.com/support/omaha/billingsupport/coxpin.asp

...but the PIN they "randomly" chose for many, including me, is the SSN4!!! Not cool! Note the SSN4 (last 4 numbers of a Social Security Number) is also the number needed for you (or someone with your PIN) to verify who you are in their automated phone system to access your billing account information.

Certainly, if a bad guy finds a COX bill in the trash, he will have your full name, address, COX account number, COX PIN (and or SSN4). And if you have COX phone service, he may have that number too.

I recommend you first, call your COX customer service and change your PIN to a number unique to COX only, then instruct them to "Omit" (their term) printing your PIN on all future bills and correspondence. Then register a complaint with them for being irresponsible - and to remind them PINs are "personal" and meant to be kept private.

Check your other bills to see if any other companies are being just as irresponsible.

Finally, bring this to the attention of every potential COX customer you know and urge them to do the same. I am posting this post on sites I frequent.

See http://www.wowt.com/home/headlines/17442574.html for text and video of TV news report.