The Equifax Breach: What You Should Know
Summary: Equifax disclosed a breach in which intruders accessed Social Security numbers, birth dates and addresses on as many as 143 million Americans, along with driver's license numbers, credit card numbers for roughly 209,000 U.S. consumers, and dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 more. The company offered one free year of credit monitoring and set up a website to let people check whether they were affected, but that site often returned differing results for the same data submitted at different times.
Why it matters: The article's core point is that credit monitoring does not stop a thief from opening new credit in your name - it may only alert you after the fact - while a security freeze blocks creditors from pulling your file at all, at a cost of $0 to $15 per bureau, or upwards of $60 across all four.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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