OPM (Mis)Spends $133M on Credit Monitoring
Summary: OPM awarded a $133 million contract to Portland-based ID Experts to provide three years of credit monitoring to nearly 22 million people whose Social Security numbers and other sensitive data were stolen by cybercriminals. The award followed an earlier $20 million contract to CSID for 18 months of protection, announced after news broke that Chinese hackers had stolen data on 4.2 million individuals, and came after OPM acknowledged the breach affected more than five times as many people as first thought.
What you should know: The article argues credit monitoring mostly notifies victims after a fraudulent line of credit is opened, while the one step that reliably blocks identity thieves - a credit freeze - can cost $5 to $15 per bureau and is not mentioned in OPM's breach advisory. For a security leader, $133 million buys notification after the fact, not prevention.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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