f13.net

Fucking Equifax got hacked and possibly 143million people were exposed.

Whee.

Already frozen credit.

I also would never compare Paris to any American city, except perhaps NYC.  Even then, I'm sure the bread is better in Paris.

It is probably true that most American cities do not have a mass transit comparable to a mass-transity European city.  I wouldn't drive a car in fucking Paris, and I don't ride mass transit in the ATL.

Along the same lines, I can get to a grocery store in 5 minutes, but most good non-barbecue restaurants are at least 30 minutes away.  Any job paying north of six figures is almost certainly more than 45 minutes away, especially in IT.  It's a quandary.

Do you mean credit cards, a line of credit or trying to check your score?

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faqs

It prevents opening new credit accounts, which is actually great when you get a discount at Kohl's by just applying for their credit card.

Presumably the stolen info would only be useful for opening new lines of credit.

Christ Equifax's website is a load of garbage. I froze my credit long ago with no regrets.

Transunion's freeze site has melted down at this point.

I'd never even known a credit freeze was a thing. With the divorce, the ex's bad habit of terrible loans and obviously knowing my SSN I should have been doing it anyway. Equifax's site says my info was compromised so now I'm in the process.  Thanks, Yeg.

Make sure you don't forget your "identity pin" or whatever it is called. My mom had a freeze because of the Anthem thing and getting the freeze lifted was super onerous without it.

Yep, printed and filed already.

I'm pissed. I'm right in the middle of refinancing my house loan and can't freeze my credit until I close.

I put a 90-day alert on my account.

I don't expect much from that, to be honest. Credit Card companies don't really fucking care to validate identity.

How do we know if we were affected?

Are you an American adult with credit? You got hacked. 143 million accounts is pretty much all of their active accounts.
Rumor is cc account numbers, balances, etc are also available.

wait

let's see Donald Trump's data

Good news is obviously no one in corporate America understands security so I should be employable well into the future.

In a fascinating "coincidence", I received my first ever LifeLock spam snail mail today.

I have no idea why Symantec didn't rename that service after they acquired it given how bad a reputation LifeLock had/has.

It has a bad reputation only among the internet population and security wonks.  The general public still thinks of it as a reputable, authoritative brand.

If anything, the 2016 election should have taught you that it doesn't matter what "very smart people" think. All that matters is what the rest of the hairless apes feel.

Heh, I guess I need to google what is wrong with lifelock.  What are they doing other than locking your credit for you?

I just did the standard credit freeze thing.  I'm annoyed that I needed to pay for it, but being as I don't open new lines of credit very often it's really something I should have done a long time ago.

Lifelock is the thing that says that your SSN is guaranteed to be safe, they put the CEO's SSN on billboard ads as "an assurance" and he got his identity stolen the next day (several times).

In theory, it should be great. Reality is it is not. I don't have that bad a service as I am almost always in Wifi or T-mobile. Problems happen when it tries to rely on wifi when the signal is too weak or needs some accept click security thing. I constantly get barely in range of the university wifi and it wants to use that but not able to connect because the signal is too weak. Tighten that up and I might be ok with it.

But yeah... it is sucky, but $30-$40 a month is what I am in it for.

Charging you $120 a year to do it and the whole "CEO's Identity Stolen" thing.

Took me 45 minutes and cost $15 to do it myself. And I didn't have to go through a 4th party customer service when I had to start elec/ gas services in my name today.

Well... that's just stupid. :oh_i_see:

As for $120 per year, I think that's fine if it saves me from doing it myself on all 3 credit bureaus.  I have more money than time.

Re: Fi, it's not just that T-Mo & Sprint are sub-par cell experiences on the best days, but the entire reason I considered it is the wifi calling.  Nevermind the quality of the wifi calls sucks, but today I did't receive a call even though I'm seven feet from my gateway.

Plan B is to install a VZW cell booster somewhere.  Not sure how that works.  If it converts cell to internet, I might be in the same boat.  The boat being where I do not get proper VZW signal inside my own home.

Doing the freeze with the 3 bureaus took me about 15 minutes and cost $20 which as far as I'm aware is one-time.  $120 per year seems like a complete ripoff.

You should do Innovis (https://www.innovis.com/personal/securityFreeze) as well.

In California the cost is $10 to unfreeze per agency if you are under 65. So it's $40 each time you need your credit unlocked if you are doing the normal freeze/thaw process. However TransUnion has a free service TrueIdentity (https://membership.trueidentity.com/tucm/orderStep1_form.page?PLACE_CTA=home:center:ti) that let's you lock and unlock your TransUnion credit report at will for free if you are willing to sign up for yet another account and put up with upselling on pretty much every page/action.

They got slapped by the FTC in 2010 for $12 million for being a bunch of frauds and when they didn't correct the things they said they would from that action they got hammered for $100 million in 2015. Then Symantec bought them because Symantec has never met a crappy or ineffectual security product they didn't like.

Thanks for the tip I froze my credit 7 years ago so I haven't really followed the newer credit agency's like Innovis. Apparently people are also suggesting to add a freeze at Chexsystems (https://www.chexsystems.com) as well.

Should we be concerned / taking action if we are Canadian?  I get a credit report through an agency called Credit Alert (www.mycreditalert.ca), but apparently, they use Equifax for the score?  Not sure how that works, but is there a good chance my info might be compromised?

As a Canadian, should I still be hitting up all the same places if I want to freeze my credit? or are there different agencies I need to look at?

I went to the breach website and found both my wife and I were affected.  So what is the drill?

I'm sure it does.  I find that I do not miss the money.  Let's say that I've outsourced this work, for perspective.  YMMV.

This is in contrast to repairing my own generator instead of buying a new one.  I sat outside AutoZone working on it in the back of my pickup for ~3 hours.  This is preferable to calling phone support goons, for me.  I'm going to replace the magneto soon and see if it starts sparking.

I also repaired my old refrigerator after three tries.  OK, so I'm not 100% that it really is repaired but so far so good.  I'd rather order parts from The Internet than call people.


(http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/eb/eb85bc61f9b2f7768db1e749279b9dcfdc091ba273127e6a86a519832d137730.jpg)

After some memory-jogging, Lifelock was actually very helpful last time my credit card was stolen.  I had forgotten that they were the ones that did all the leg(phone?)work for us to get everything cancelled and whatnot.

Did they somehow take care of setting all your autopay accounts up with the new card?  If they did that I can almost see it being worth it, because that shit is a pain in the ass.  I can't think of what other legwork is even involved with getting a card replaced.

Here are the basics:

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2017/09/equifax-data-breach-what-do
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faqs

If you don't want to freeze your credit files right now you should put alerts on them. In addition to the Big 3 you may want to put in alerts or freezes at Innovis and ChexSystems too.

The other thing you should think about doing is making it harder to get access to your financial accounts, like, for example, setting up 2FA for your online accounts *and* your recovery email address(es). Unfortunately 2FA using SMS, which is the standard way it's done these days, is not particular secure (e.g. the NIST no long recommends it) but it's still better than not having it. I.e. it's one more hoop a would-be attacker would need to jump through (hacking your cellular phone#) and there are plenty of easier targets to go after first.

Thanks for the links, Trippy.

Just put a freeze on my accounts.  I was able to do all of them online in about 5 minutes total.  Equifax was free, as were Chexsystems and Innovis.  Experian charged me $3, which is what my state allows, apparently.  Transunion I will need to call because they still are insisting I send them a copy of my dl and ssn card through the mail because they can't seem to sort out some address cock up they made. 

Can't decide whether to freak out about this or fall back on the fact that so many were taken that the probability  that my info is actually used is fairly small.

It happened to a co-worker of mine and basically turned his life into a living hell.  It's been seven years since it happened and he still gets calls and letters from creditors seeking to collect on debts the criminals owe.

https://www.chexsystems.com/

They helpfully have navigation to place a freeze from their landing page.  Equifax and Transunion were not working last night, and Innovis is sending me a snail mail?  Yeah, I did it for all 5.  Pissed because I already had Equifax monitoring.  Switched to Transunion for US (already had it for CDN). 

Unless you've never an unfair and random problem with credit (like a hidden traffic ticket sent to collections), it's hard to understand how shitty it is to try and rebuild your credit score.  And I can't imagine identity theft.  So, yeah freeze+++++ and monitoring.

Unfortunately my wife handled that stuff, so I'll say "I think so".  Mostly because I can't think of what else we would need help with other than that.  There is a large spreadsheet with everything we use the card for; and note that I keep using the singular.  Critical lines are highlighted, while the rest are things like Pandora and SiriusXM.  Still takes an obscene amount of time to manage it after a stolen CC incident.

Of course, after the last time it happened (January?) I changed as many things as possible to Paypal.  This wasn't many things, unfortunately.

A few years ago I set up a credit card whose sole job is bills -- utilities, Netflix, anything that's a recurring charge and reputable.  Nothing else ever goes on that card, which means it never gets stolen (at least until somebody like PG&E has a breach, which I'm sure is coming any day now since they're running out of other ways to screw their customers).

That would be smart but I'm happy to leave the bill management to my better half.