Equifax Takes The Data Breach Cake - Comments Page 1

Lock your Equifax credit profile and leave it locked. Lenders can use either of the other two credit reporting agencies to evaluate your creditworthiness. If a significant number of victims refuse to be Equifax's product forever, the company will starve to death as it deserves.

In fact, we can use this weapon on all of the credit reporting agencies, one at a time, to force consumer reforms. Even one calendar quarter without products to sell will force their hands.

Lock your Equifax credit profile and leave it locked. Lenders can use either of the other two credit reporting agencies to evaluate your creditworthiness. If a significant number of victims refuse to be Equifax's product forever, the company will starve to death as it deserves.

In fact, we can use this weapon on all of the credit reporting agencies, one at a time, to force consumer reforms. Even one calendar quarter without products to sell will force their hands.

David: "Lenders can use either of the other two credit reporting agencies to evaluate your creditworthiness."

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I've had my credit reports locked for years. Once you lock one, all the credit reports are locked. It cost $10 to unlock it for a specified period of time (24 hrs, 3 days, 1 week, etc, etc...) after which time it locks again. I've done this a couple of times in order to get a new credit card.
-Bob K.

One would think that a firm such as Equifax would have one of the very best data security features available. Wonder how the hackers were able to penetrate it? An inside job? Maybe you will have more such details in the near future ?
Thanks for your great articles ! Ed B.

That is why I signed up for LifeLock months ago, then obtained their maximum package. I grew trier of watching what is happening in businesses, world wide, in obtaining profits to make themselves look good to the Stock Exchange market place by deferring maintenance, laying off employees, obtaining H1B employees or delaying critical need areas which cyber-security is foremost these days.

Everything about this horrendous occurrence has been highly negative from the start. And I was disappointed to not see any mention of it here until a week after the story broke. A very rare thing for you, Bob. I'm guessing you were suffering shock and disbelief. I was!

You now have a more than a 50 percent chance not only of having your personal information made public but learning first hand what identity theft feels like!

People, if you do not write your congressman and senator about this, the subject WILL just vanish from the news in a month or so!

Wayne

When are consumer going to demand security of their financial info?? These institutions only care about the info they can mine for sale.

We should boycott credit commerce for 24 hours. No one use a credit, debit or store card, rewards card, loyalty card, a check or sign up for anything that tracks your email address. Let's be a cash only society for one day. Maybe they'll pay attention when it cuts into their revenue streams.

Wow,this is a real insider trading situation! Knowing about the breach and shorting the stock. Kinda like what Enron executives did when their company was in default!

And to wait so long to report the incident which divulged so much financial information! So much for double securing their data servers! Companies should be fined heavily for situations like this!

Seems to me that everybody affected by this should automatically be enrolled in credit monitoring plus have a freeze on their credit reports with equifax paying the price to unlock when needed for at least one year.

I am a Canadian who went through the hoops trying to figure out if the website was authentic. Finally, I decided to trust the new source that provided the link to Equifax. The response at the website was substandard to say the least, with the same "Come back and see us at our leisure and we will do something or other" as Bob above mentions.

How does a security breach of this magnitude sneak past the people watching the store? We aren't talking here about a slight increase in internet traffic, but rather a lot of data being transferred beyond normal. Taking a wild guess at each record downloaded would be 1k (and probably much more), and close to 1 1/2 million records, that should have easily shown up in the blinking lights and log files.

How does one lock their Equifax credit profile?

Since I also entered my SS# to login to the referenced website to see if I was affected by the breach and it said that I was. Since you indicate that the site itself is suspect, should I now be even more concerned about having given them my info? Thanks!

Pretty good summary, Bob, and I can understand you taking a deep breath before posting this, as well as trying to find out exactly what's going on.
For what it's worth the two major sellers were the Chief financial Officer (1$m+) and the President of US information solutions (0.5$m+) - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-07/three-equifax-executives-sold-stock-before-revealing-cyber-hack.
Now you can see that these insignificant little people would probably not have been told about such a minor incident.
I loved the (non-secure) Wordpress approach: Equifax were trusted, by e.g. your bank, with your personal data, and they left it lying around and someone walked off with, and may now be going to screw you. So Equifax would like to make it up to you by signing you up for another dodgy product.
Keep checking you bank and card accounts, girls and boys

I knew something was up in August because I started getting tons of phishing fake emails from my bank, Amazon , ITunes, credit cards etc.
Also started getting a lot of cell phone calls with no messages, and blocked all of those. So I'm sure my info was compromised. So far doesn't look like they have any success with my personal info, I do have lifelock. Is that effective? I refuse to 'register' with Equifax and their BS crap. I'm sure this is going to be a continuing problem for all!

My understanding of the credit monitoring services is that they are basically useless since they actually notice something after the fraud has taken place. I vote for freezing my accounts at all three credit reporting agencies. If the crooks try opening an account in my name the company issuing credit won't get a reply from the credit reporting agency and no new account will be established.

"I've had my credit reports locked for years. Once you lock one, all the credit reports are locked. "

If you are referring to freezing your credit report, you have to do it at all three bureaus. I did it on Friday.

I asked for a credit report from Equifax the day before they announced the breach. Entered all my data, submitted it, site churned and said report ready. Then suddenly I'm informed they won't do an online report; I'll have to submit all of the data I just submitted plus additional ID by mail in order to obtain my free report. They never should have let me start the free credit report process!

Oh my nerves! Bob, your info confirmed the fact that the "right to sue" portion of their terms was removed before I followed through with all of Equifax's direction. Sept. the 13th is the available date for me.(13th).
Freeze my credit. Well, 3 weeks ago a small dump truck ran over my car's front end. The body shop may total it then I'll take a loss. The car's older and I was thinking of purchasing another after it was fixed. Totaled= less than private resale value.

I had just read another article before I read yours and locked them all down.
TransUnion you have to do online, the other by phone or all of them by mail. Took me less than fifteen minutes to do them all.