Surviving The Equifax Security Breach
How to Protect Yourself After 143 Million Accounts Were Hacked
What Happened:
On September 7th, Equifax — one of the three large credit monitoring agencies — reported that it had suffered a massive data breach by hackers. Worse, they reported that the hack had occurred five weeks previously, on July 29th. That data breach exposed credit information, social security numbers and other information on more than 143 million Americans and some foreigners. Why did Equifax wait five weeks before telling anyone about this massive hack? Your guess is as good a mine. A data breach that severe, followed by a five-week delay in letting consumers know that it had occurred isn’t OK with me, and it shouldn’t be for you.
To put this kind of hack in scope, I’d compare it to Hurricane Irma: it’s catastrophic, massive in scope and something from which it will take some of us many years to recover. I say “some of us”, because hopefully, by reading this primer, you’ll be one step ahead of the crowd. The Equifax breach exposed hundreds of millions of social security numbers. We cannot allow hackers with malicious intent to have access to our Social Security Numbers without increased security measures.
Experts, myself included, recommend implementing two tools to help protect and — in some cases — lock down your financial information:
- Sign up for free credit monitoring at websites like Credit Karma
- Freeze your credit reports at all…
