Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Thinking Through the Equifax Security Breach

If you’re one of the 143 million Americans who just got screwed by the massive security breach at Equifax, you may be wondering what you can do to protect yourself going forward. I’ve compiled some ideas and hope readers will include additional suggestions in the comments section.
To recap for those who’ve been living under a rock, the personal data that was stolen included names, addresses, social security numbers, and birthdates. In addition, 209,000 had their credit card numbers stolen, 182,000 had dispute documents with personal data stolen, and an undetermined number of people had their driver’s license numbers stolen.
Of course, if you’ve been living under a rock you probably need not worry about any of this. For everyone else, if you had your identity stolen (and the chances are greater than 50% that it was), the actions you take to protect yourself will need to be implemented for the rest of your life since the information has long since been disseminated over the dark web. It’s out there. Forever.
Welcome to our brave new world. It’s hard not to be cynical, skeptical, or downright fuming over the fact that so many organizations collect data on us, even if we didn’t ask them to. And then they get hacked and our information is stolen. But I don’t want to go off on a tangent of commentary on this hideous debacle. I just want to offer some possible solutions.  
First, how do you know if you’ve been a victim of this gargantuan breach? Well, Equifax will tell you. Sort of, slightly, vaguely, and unreliably.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/09/thinking_through_the_equifax_security_breach_.html#ixzz4tFYJLsag 

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