Only 143 million Americans need to worry about the recent Equifax data breach - Comment
Only 143 million Americans need to worry about the recent Equifax data breach |
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| I was originally going to write another guide centered around buying a car but something much bigger has happened in the last day. Back in July, Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting bureaus in the U.S., discovered that they had been hacked and that around 143 million people may be affected by it. Things that were likely stolen include names, addresses, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and phone numbers. In addition, if you’re one of the 200,000+ who has ever had a paid account with Equifax, your credit card information may have gotten into the hands of the hackers. They claimed they waited until Thursday, nearly six weeks after the discovery, to tell the public so that they could get together a plan to mitigate the damage. I’m not going to go into the rage that many people will probably feel over this when they may have never even heard of the company in the past, but learned that their identity may have been stolen because Equifax has their personal information. Equifax has created a site to let you check to see if your records may have been exposed. https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/potential-impact Of the ~320 million people in America, discounting 60 million or so minors, more than half of the adults in the country are at risk. Here is the site to see if you’re at risk - chances are you’ll be given a date to come back to the site if you want to sign up for 1 year of credit monitoring for free, provided by Equifax. Not sure how trustworthy they are at this point, the hack as bad enough but the long delay in reporting it looks awfully suspicious. The fact that three of their managers sold large amounts of stock in the company after the breach, but before it was made public looks even more shady. If you don’t want to roll the dice with Equifax, you can get credit alerts and your credit score here: http://checkingcreditinformation.com/tracking-credit-score-changes - Basically if anything pops up that you don’t know about, they’ll email you letting you know about it immediately. Your other option would be to freeze your credit. It’s not a bad idea but since you haven’t technically had anything opened in your name yet, it might cost you some money depending on your state. No matter what you do, KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR CREDIT over the next few months. More information will probably trickle out in the coming days but for now, you want to make sure your identity is safe and that if something does pop up, it gets brought to your attention right away. | |||
| Posted by : peter88 | Post date : 2017-09-09 00:15 | ||
| Category : Popular Memes and Images | Views : 738 | ||
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