By now, many of you have probably heard about the Equifax debacle. But, for those who haven’t, here is what happened.
What Happened?
In mid may, the credit monitoring firm Equifax, was hacked and data relating to nearly 143 million consumers was stolen. To give you an idea of the scope, that is roughly seventy or so percent of the adult population of the USA.
They reported the hack six weeks later, after many of their top officials offloaded much of their stocks, and Equifax is currently being sued by at least 21 different class-action lawsuits as a result of negligence.
There is a strong likelihood that many people reading this are affected in some way by the breach in security.
What this means:
Essentially many Americans are playing the lottery right now to see if their identity gets stolen. Individual profiles can go for as much as $30 per person on the deep web, meaning that cyberthieves can purchase your information and use it to sign up for credit cards (and max them out), purchase medications, re-route your social-security check, and even take your tax-returns.
What Should I Do?
Here are some things that you can do, to protect yourself and your information.
1. Check to see if you are impacted.
You can learn more about whether or not your information was impacted https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/potential-impact/ (yes, this is being run by the very people who lost your information in the first place) This is a good place to start, but even if the website states that you weren’t likely impacted by the breach, it might still be a good idea to follow the next steps.
2. Sign up for Credit Monitoring.
The website will then offer to set you up for a year of free credit monitoring. This is actually a pretty good route to go, while they originally had a clause in place to prevent people who used this service from being sued, it has since removed that clause. So, you can still join one of the many class action lawsuits if you feel your credit or personal information has been impacted.
However, it is very likely that the impact of this breach will last far longer than a year. It may be a good idea to continue to monitor your credit in the long run.
3. Check your credit report.
A good site to do this with is www.annualcreditreport.com. Under federal law, you are entitled to a free copy of your credit report every 12 months from each credit reporting company, such as Equifax, Experian, and Transunion. If you find any issues or errors on your credit report contact each credit bureau individually to resolve the issues.
4. Monitor your credit cards and bank accounts.
Check often to make sure that the transactions you are seeing are legitimate. For many people, this is already a habit, though over time monitoring the cash flow of accounts has become something that many people have stopped doing. It is time to change that.
5. Consider placing a credit freeze on your reports.
This will make it more difficult for a thief to open a new account using your information. However, it cannot prevent a thief from making changes to existing accounts.
6. Consider Setting a Fraud Alert.
This will require creditors to verify your identity before issuing a new credit card or opening a new account. This won’t prevent a lender from opening credit in your name like a freeze will, but does require lenders to take additional steps in verifying your identity before they can do so.
7. Become more security minded.
This sort of breach could affect consumers for the next couple decades. There is no telling if, or when your information will be sold. The steps listed above shouldn’t be treated as a patch, but a lifestyle change. We have to accept that we now live in a world where our information can, and often will, be stolen and repeatedly take steps to prevent such events from destroying our livelihoods.
In Conclusion
This sort of incident has happened before, but never on this scale. There will always be institutions which have your information, and there will always be people who try to steal it. Breaches will happen again. The best thing that we can do as consumers is to be mindful of our situation, become active in monitoring our own credit and expenses, and secure our data better, use different passwords for each website we join, etc.
In this day and age, we need to be more security-minded, and not simply assume that the companies which use our data will be able to protect us.
For more information on steps that you can take, visit this website.
