TL;DR

Freeze your credit and Monitor your financial accounts.

What happened?

It’s all over the news, but if you haven’t heard, Equifax had a database breach which basically puts everyone in the United States with a credit history at risk for identity theft. They claim 143 Million Americans have been affected and provide a tool for people to check if they’ve been affected. But I think it’s safe to say that everyone is affected by this. They are also providing some identity theft protection which you may choose to sign up for (currently there is a clause in the signup that waives you from participating in any class action lawsuits that may occur which you definitely want to be a part of if it does come to that.)

here is one of the articles for reference: Protect-Yourself-Equifax-Data-Breach

What or who is Equifax?

Equifax is one of the three major credit reporting agencies within the United States, the other two being Experian and Transunion. Basically these guys own our financial lives.

What you should do?

1. monitor your existing accounts frequently to look for any thieves trying to access ANY of your financial accounts (bank, credit card, insurance statements, etc)
2. Put a freeze on your credit, do this with all three credit bureaus.
   • https://www.freeze.equifax.com
   • https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
   • https://freeze.transunion.com/sf/securityFreeze/landingPage.jsp

Some info on credit freezes

• A credit freeze does not affect your credit score.
• Yes you can still use your current credit cards and bank accounts.
• Then what does it do? This basically stops people from pulling your credit report, so when the thieves try to open a new account they can’t.
• reference articles
  • https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faqs
  • https://www.oag.ca.gov/idtheft/facts/freeze-your-credit)

If everyone is already covering this and writing articles why am I writing a post.

Creating a short all you need to know so that I can share something with family and friends