If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

They waited a while to tell you, though, so some managers could dump their stock first.

You can supposedly go here to see if they compromised your information, but I don't get an answer either way.

They're also letting you sign up for one year of monitoring (that should be plenty!), but I think you have to sign away some of your rights to do it.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Equifax data breach help site leaves consumers with more questions than answers | TechCrunch

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

This is a good read,
Why the Equifax breach is very possibly the worst leak of personal info ever | Ars Technica

Basically they gave their security to amateurs and you shouldn't trust anything they do.
I can pretty much guarantee you that someone somewhere is trying to abuse their "checking" site to scrape the data entered on it and I don't trust them to be good enough not to do something stupid like dump data into a log or unprotected cache while the server is slammed with entries.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

I should add to that that you shouldn't ever consider your 'personal information' data that secure to begin with. the SSN system was never designed to be a secret passcode identifier, I mean the first 3 numbers of a 9 digit code are assigned based on birth place so it's really a secret 6 number code.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

So the fine print with regard to 'signing with p for the service' has to do with TrustedID if you sign up for that, and appears to not bar you from lolsuiting Equifax.

Speaking of.

Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack - Bloomberg

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Equifax Lobbied To Kill Rule Protecting Victims Of Data Breaches

Niiiiiiiiice.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Further clarification on their site:

Cybersecurity Incident & Important Consumer Information | Equifax

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Fourth time I've had my PI stolen. Target, Office of Personnel Management, South Carolina Department of Revenue Services, and now this one. I should have a lifetime paid subscription to an indentity theft service at this point. Malafala, this is so annoying.

I'm trying to enroll in the TrustedID Premier services, but the email taking me through the process has yet to reach me (will it ever?).

Tomorrow I'm likely going to call all the credit bureaus and put a hold on my credit. It's going to be really inconvenient, but it's about my only option to cover my ass.

ETA: You can freeze your credit with Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion online. Took about ten minutes to do all three. Now to find a safe place to hide my pin numbers for Equifax and Experian. TransUnion has a login service that you can log into to freeze/thaw your credit, as well as monitor your credit raiting.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Good article on the steps you should take. I froze my credit, and then went to IdentityTheft.Gov but they would not let me file a Identity Theft Report at the moment since my information has not yet been compromised. They simply said "Freeze your credit, get a credit report, file your taxes early, and if things go sideways, come back here."

YSK: What your options for responding to Equifax are because if you're an American adult you have almost definitely been compromised. : YouShouldKnow

ETA: I'm surprised at how many people don't understand how freezing your credit works, or who aren't taking the situation seriously.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Good luck getting any of the credit services to process things online. I haven't had any success.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

I'd just gotten copies of my credit report and put a fraud alert on my accounts because of a different thing, so I haven't had to do it since. But a couple of notes that might now be out of date.

The annual credit report site wasn't working for Experian, so I had to sign up for an account on their site to do that, and despite opting out of spam, they have been sending me spam every day claiming it is actually vitally important information I need so I'm not allowed to opt out of it. So I changed the email address to a dummy, but it kept coming. I sorely regret giving them my real email address. I plussed it, but that doesn't matter to them.

And when I signed up for the fraud alert over the phone with TransUnion, they forced me to sit through two separate marketing pitches for their "premium" service, and the second one was about five minutes long. That's not an exaggeration.

But whatever you do, do NOT sign up for paid services with these organizations, and don't give them any information that you don't absolutely positively have to. Every little bit of data you hand them is added to their databases, and there's virtually nothing they're not allowed to do with it. Don't help them.

I've been using Abine Blur to generate single use email addresses and things like that, and I wish I'd done so with Experian. I really don't know enough about these things to personally vouch for its security, though. They do grab some of your information themselves, but generally less than most apps do, so I gamble on them rather than on everyone else. I'm not going to tell anyone else it's safe or anything, because I don't know for sure, but I decided it's safe enough for me.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

I read somewhere that if you had your credit frozen by Experian before the hack, you'll need to unfreeze it, and then re-freeze it to get a new pin (because the hack may have netted them your pin number).

I'm happy I live in a state where doing so is free. I have some friends who are looking at $30 for each of the three services. What a f**king mess. If I could just unplug, I'd heavily consider it.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Oh, I just put a fraud alert, not a freeze. I know for a fact I would lose that PIN.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Shit be all like

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Somebody using your email address? :yup:

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Ha, no, it was this one.

Back when my brother was just getting ready to start his first post-college job, he had a little bit of imposter syndrome, and I told him that'd go away after a couple of months, and that the biggest realization isn't about your own competence, but everyone else's incompetence. All those people who are super-confident in their skills and think they know the answers to everything are full of shit. I was right. It took him a couple of months.

So all these data breaches are probably bolstering the confidence of anyone who would have known to use strong encryption when storing sensitive PII. This shit isn't anywhere close to what I do, but I know I would have done it better than all these assholes whose job it was. I must be some kind of genius!

(In "stupid people using my email address" news, though: I have recently started getting headshots of aspiring child actors. Lists of "matches" like a dating site, except with a bunch of little kids in Michigan. It is super-creepy.)

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Idk they set the bar pretty high!
Login: admin password: admin... welcome to equifax Argentina.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

The Equifax Breach Was Entirely Preventable (via Equifax Should Not Be In Business By 2018 - Lawyers, Guns & Money)

I hope they go out of business, and if there's any justice, they will.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Maybe someone using my # will improve my credit :1thumbup:

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

I haven't read much more about this topic than this thread because I was so pissed when I heard that this happened and that the 'solution' everyone was recommending was to pay them. I don't even understand why these agencies are allowed to exist in the first place.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

Yeah, that I don't get either. I mean, I guess I understand that you wouldn't be legally prohibited from starting a credit reporting agency. We have barely any privacy protections for individuals in the US, so yeah, the part where they stalk you throughout your life and try to gather information that's none of their business is perfectly legal. That should be illegal, but it's not.

But that information is wrong all the fucking time, and that wrongness often has direct financial costs for the people they're being wrong about, so I don't get how the business model works. How are they not being sued out of existence by people who have suffered economic damages as a result of the credit agencies recklessly repeating false information about them that ends up clearly and provably damaging them financially?

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

True that. Not much anyone could do to make my credit any worse that my ex-wife's continuing shenanigans. One report last year put my credit rating at 147 -- my attorney told me that in almost 30 years of lawyering he had never heard of a credit rating that low. #WINNING

So good luck trying to get open a line of credit using my SS#, fuckers.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

It's not just about getting loans, though. If your identity is stolen, people can rack up criminal charges, tickets, and other bills that aren't dependent on your credit, and even end up getting their medical records tied up with yours and things like that.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

They have billions, and lawyers by the dozen to make any case against them so expensive as to be not worth the attempt. Plus they lobby and Congress probably protects their sorry asses, making it a practically impossible uphill climb to win a lawsuit.

It pisses me off to no end that our legal system, like everything else in this country, comes down to "who has the most money". Are we a democracy? A republic? No, we're a f**king oligarchy. Capitalism for the f**king win.

Re: If you have a social security number, Equifax probably just gave it away.
 

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Equifax just linked customers to my fake phishing version of their site by accident. ������ <a href="https://t.co/kXQdwKys71">https://t.co/kXQdwKys71</a></p>&mdash; Nick Sweeting �� (@thesquashSH) <a href="https://twitter.com/thesquashSH/status/910512164938665984">September 20, 2017</a></blockquote>
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