News reports have been flooding in with coverage of the recently revealed Equifax breach. As Equifax is one of the “big three” credit reporting agencies, this is a large incident impacting all Americans — whether or not your data was stolen. While they are still researching the scope and extent of the breach, it is best to assume that:
- Your data was in the breach.
- Criminals now have your Name, Address, SSN, and any other data provided by you or anyone else to Equifax.
- Criminals have your Credit Card if you ever provided it to Equifax (over 209k are known to have been exposed).
What should you do?
- Be on the lookout for scams and spear phishing attacks. As criminals now have information that they wouldn’t have had prior. They can craft communications to you that may appear more legitimate than it would otherwise. If you don’t have a security awareness training program, contact Upic, we can help.
- Consider filing your taxes early to minimize the risk of tax fraud schemes.
- Enroll in the credit monitoring offered by Equifax, and consider contacting the major credit reporting agencies to enable a credit freeze.
Remember, the data is now in the hands of criminals and the risks of that won’t go away in the year of credit monitoring Equifax is providing.
Two additional resources for more information are the FTC’s consumer information blog and a long Q&A post by security journalist Brian Krebs.