Planet Money podcast:
How useful, really, are the steps you can take after a data breach?
Answer: Freeze your credit, period. There's not much else and everything else falls under the category "(Shrug), couldn't hurt, why not?"
1) If you sign up for credit monitoring, read the fine print to see if you're waiving your right to sue.
2) If your credit is frozen, it doesn't block anything else. "Like, if you were trying to get a job, somebody can still call up Experian and be like, can I look at the report? And the answer is probably yes. You're not trying to, like, open a new line of credit.... [But] nobody can get a loan in your name."
3) I already knew this of course, but it's worth emphasizing:
How useful, really, are the steps you can take after a data breach?
Answer: Freeze your credit, period. There's not much else and everything else falls under the category "(Shrug), couldn't hurt, why not?"
- Order your credit reports. "It's helpful.... the time between the hack and when you get that letter - it's not supposed to be very long, but sometimes it takes months. So it is very possible that something bad and suspicious happened in that time period."
- Enroll in credit and identity monitoring services. "It's not not useful." But "you want to be a little bit careful as you sign up. It is very possible that, as you go in - and this is what happened to me - that as you go to sign up, you will be asked to waive your right to legal action."
- Contact the US Federal Trade Commission. "if they get a lot of complaints about something, they will go and act on that. Are they going call you, Kenny, and be like, hey, Kenny, I'm going help you out?" [Implicit "no."]
- Place a fraud alert on your file. "that one is not a bad idea. Not bad. Not bad. Fraud alert."
- Security freeze. "this does appear to be the kind of gold star of what you can do to protect yourself."
1) If you sign up for credit monitoring, read the fine print to see if you're waiving your right to sue.
2) If your credit is frozen, it doesn't block anything else. "Like, if you were trying to get a job, somebody can still call up Experian and be like, can I look at the report? And the answer is probably yes. You're not trying to, like, open a new line of credit.... [But] nobody can get a loan in your name."
3) I already knew this of course, but it's worth emphasizing:
(Company never named but likely National Public Data). Your personal accounts are not the biggest point of vulnerability....this is particularly frustrating to me, I will say, before we get into this, because I'm very careful about my passwords. I change my passwords all the time. I use very complex passwords that I can't remember. I use a password manager to keep track of them. I use two-factor authentication. It doesn't matter in this case because they didn't hack me personally. They hacked this big company that had all of my data.
Statistics: Posted by nisiprius — Sun Dec 08, 2024 6:49 am — Replies 3 — Views 411