09/17/2017
It's a scary world out there. Please read:
The Equifax Breach: What You Should Know (Brian Krebs, Krebs On Security) – The big news this past week was that credit bureau Equifax revealed a data breach that may have released key personal data, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and even some driver’s license numbers, on as many as 143 million Americans, to hackers who intend to sell the data to identity thieves. As an initial response to the issue, Equifax is offering one free year of their credit monitoring service, and has posted a new website where people can input their information to determine if they were affected (although initially the site appeared to be broken, and was returning different results for the same data). Notably, there was also an initial discussion that entering your information into the Equifax website would itself force you to waive your rights to sue the company, although Equifax has since clarified that identifying if you were impacted by the cybersecurity breach will not waive your legal rights regarding the incident. Yet the caveat is that even by enrolling yourself into a credit monitoring service, you will not actually stop data thieves; all the solution will do is notify you (generally relatively quickly) after an identity thief has stolen your identity and is taking actions that may impact your credit. Accordingly, the best way to actually prevent identity theft is to file for a “security freeze”, which blocks any potential creditors from being able to view or “pull” your credit file, unless you affirmatively unfreeze or thaw your file beforehand – which means identity thieves won’t be able to apply for credit cards or loans in your name, because creditors generally won’t issue loans if they can’t gauge the risk by viewing your (now frozen) credit file. In order to freeze your credit, it’s necessary to notify each of the major bureaus (one at a time to Equifax, Experian, Trans Union, and Innovis), which can be done online in some cases but for others requires reaching out by telephone or by writing. Some states permit credit bureaus to charge a small fee (up to $15) for placing a freeze as well. Once frozen, each bureau will provide you a unique Personal Identification Number (PIN) that you can use to thaw your credit file in the event that you actually want/need to apply for credit in the future. A less arduous alternative is to obtain a fraud alert – rather than a credit freeze – which tells lenders not to grant credit in your name without first contacting you to obtain approval (by telephone or whatever other method you indicate in the fraud alert), and the process can be completed quickly online or via telephone, and notifying one bureau automatically propagates the fraud alert to other bureaus; however, the caveat is that fraud alerts only last for 90 days and then must be renewed (though you can obtain an extended fraud alert for 7 years, but only if you’ve already been a victim of identity theft and can provide a police report to substantiate it), and while a fraud alert requests lenders to contact you before granting credit, they are not legally required to do so (which makes the credit freeze far more secure).
