It could be like Lehman brothers debacle. What if slowly all of our financial system gets messed up, if the data is available to hackers or north Korea or Russians it is not very difficult to seed sufficent panic among people, which means people could stop online transactions, you known what next. Am I only idiot thinking all of this..
It'll be interesting to see whether there's an increase in fraud as a result of this. If there is, the side effects could be dramatic. Given the scale of the breach, this isn't just about individuals being at risk of fraud. The financial system is now at risk, because the authentication methods that it uses today have been compromised. The Equifax hackers may have obtained enough information to impersonate anyone in the country. Until we can be certain that they don't, anyone who can open a new line of credit over the phone can later claim that their identity was stolen - it wasn't them, so they don't have to repay that loan. The country needs a new authentication system. That's been true for a long time, but now we can no longer pretend otherwise.
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Yes. Place a freeze on your account with the three credit agencies if you are worried and stop watching cable news.
Ever wonder if Equifax leaked enough information for someone to call a credit agency, pretend to be you, and lift your credit freeze? Given that Equifax is able to create and lift freezes on their own, it seems likely that they had enough information to facilitate this kind of thing. The possibility that this much information has been leaked means that the country needs to redesign the authentication methods used by banks. Because there is no reason to trust the old ones. They've been compromised.
Yes but up until the redesign comes freezing the account is your best bet. It's like any other security measure, if you lock your bike, someone can bring in a chainsaw and cut the lock and steal the bike, the point is if yours has a higher barrier to entry than others, the thieves are less likely to waste time with your account and more likely to move on to the next guy's.