![]() “You’re hoping the thief stumbles on the locked door.” He recommended that all those affected immediately place a fraud alert on all three of their credit files, which anyone can do for free.Įquifax’s offer of one year of free protection falls short of what consumers really need, because their information can be bought and sold by hackers for years to come, Mr. “It’s like locking one of three doors in your house and leaving the other two unlocked,” Mr. Thieves could have information stolen from Equifax and used it to open accounts with creditors that use Experian or TransUnion. It also suggests contacting a law enforcement agency if you believe any stolen information has already been used in some way.Įquifax is offering consumers the ability to freeze their Equifax credit reports, said John Ulzheimer, a consumer credit expert who often does expert witness work for banks and credit unions and worked at Equifax in the 1990s. The company also suggests getting a free copy of your credit report from the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Instead, the site provides an enrollment date for its protection service, and it may not start for several days. When they do, however, they do not necessarily get confirmation about whether they were affected. The site encourages customers to offer their last name and the last six digits of their Social Security number. People can go to the Equifax website to see if their information has been compromised. Using the data stolen from Equifax, identity thieves can impersonate people with lenders, creditors and service providers, who rely on personal identity information from Equifax to make financial decisions regarding potential customers.Įquifax has created a website, to help consumers determine whether their data was at risk. The company handles data on more than 820 million consumers and more than 91 million businesses worldwide and manages a database with employee information from more than 7,100 employers, according to its website. The shares were not part of a sale planned in advance, Bloomberg reported. ![]() Potentially adding to criticism of the company, three senior executives, including the company’s chief financial officer, John Gamble, sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the breach was discovered. “Equifax should have multiple layers of controls” so if hackers manage to break in, they can at least be stopped before they do too much damage, Ms. And earlier this year, thieves again stole W-2 tax data from an Equifax subsidiary, TALX, which provides online payroll, tax and human resources services to some of the nation’s largest corporations.Ĭybersecurity professionals criticized Equifax on Thursday for not improving its security practices after those previous thefts, and they noted that thieves were able to get the company’s crown jewels through a simple website vulnerability. Last year, identity thieves successfully made off with critical W-2 tax and salary data from an Equifax website. spokesperson said the agency was aware of the breach and was tracking the situation.
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