Historic Equifax Hack Hits Potential 148 Million American Wallets

What is the world coming to, when a storehouse of Americans’ most personal credit information and social security numbers, some of the most encrypted data in existence, is hacked and compromised? This is the real deal, this is serious, and this is the world we live in today. Cybersecurity is becoming more and more important due to the threat of hackers and cybercriminals, with a new one popping up every few weeks. We’ve seen other hacks that have compromised more than 148 million people, but we haven’t seen a hack that is able to provide criminals with EVERYTHING they need to commit identity theft. Social Security numbers, birthdates, address histories, legal names, all were obtained through the Equifax hack.

Credit Bureaus like Equifax serve as a storehouse, or safe house for Americans credit information. Lenders use these companies to assess credit information to approve financing for homes, cars, credit cards, etc. Credit checks are also done by employers on potential employees using these “safe houses.” This is what makes this breach one of the worst in history. This isn’t a breach of information that was found in similar hacks like Target, Home Depot, or Yahoo.

This is finite financial information. Any and all the information needed to sell to criminals around the world in order to commit full identity theft.  So what now?

Equifax has set up a website that you can check to see whether or not your information has been compromised. You can check that at equifaxsecurity2017.com. If and when you find out that you have been compromised, you’ll be given a date for when you can be enrolled to receive identity theft and credit file monitoring. Something similar that we saw provided following the Anthem Breach we talked about a few weeks ago here on our blog. Rick Smith, Chairman and CEO of Equifax was featured in this video on the website.

We know security, and we know data recovery. We have worked with major corporations and companies from all over the United States to help recover stolen data and recover data lost in disaster. We’ve recently worked with companies down in Houston Texas following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. By backing up crucial data on external servers, we can save terabytes of data lost to local servers that are destroyed by floodwater.

With the natural disasters looming on both corners of our country with wildfires and hurricanes, backing up data in case of emergency is very important. This, along with the threats of hacking and cybersecurity breach should be reason enough to look into managed IT services, even to supplement your existing IT team. Turn to a team who can provide network security and disaster recovery plans that protect your data, or you might be sorry you didn’t.