UPDATE:
News is now reporting that Equifax had an additional hack, a potential related precursor to the hack in May, 2 months prior – this one in March. At the time this original hack happened, Apache Software issued a software patch to be immediately implemented – Equifax did not do it, causing the 2nd more extensive breach.
Credit experts are advising individuals to immediately go out and FREEZE YOUR CREDIT on ALL 3 Sites – Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. If you need to purchase a home/auto/other, unfreeze your for that purchase then re-freeze it!
Original Post: 09/14/2017
By now you’ve most likely heard that Equifax, one of the 3 credit reporting entities, had a data breach back in May of this year. It is estimated that nearly 50% or 143 Million Americans may have been affected by this incident. And Yes.. you heard me right… MAY and we just now found out about this. The SEC is looking into why it took Equifax so long to notify the public of the breach. In the meantime, major stockholders sold off their shares of stock before the public was made aware. I say this only because this could very well be determined to be an act of insider trading and the SEC is also looking into this as well.
Regardless of all of that, Equifax does have a link online where you can check to see if your personal information was breached. Equifax is also offering – FREE TO ALL AMERICAN CITIZENS, their Trusted ID Premier package for 1 year. This is credit monitoring service that will provide upto $1.0Million of ID Theft Insurance – for FREE for 1 YEAR! All you need to do is go to their site (Provided below) and enter your Name and partial Social Security number to see if you were affected. BTW, Equifax removed the disclaimer where, last week, you waived your rights (Thank you NY AG). I just checked mine this morning and well.. I don’t know if I was or not. Upon entering my info, the screen that popped up said “Based on the information you provided, it does not appear that your information was breached” so I clicked the Enroll button to enroll myself in the credit monitoring service… then the next popup said “Based on the information you provided, you may have been compromised”. Soooo… maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t..sigh.
Even if I’m not compromised, it doesn’t hurt to cover myself, or Yourself, for a year. The online instructions are simple, the information has been nicely laid out for you on their site.
Here is the link: https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/enroll/
