Was Your Social Security Number Hacked?
In case you haven’t heard, it was recently confirmed that there was a MASSIVE data security breach that may have resulted in some 2.9 billion personal data records being offered up for sale on the dark web. The data was hacked and stolen from a company called National Public Data by a cybercriminal group named USDoD.
The information stolen included names, email and physical addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers. With that extensive amount of information, undoubtedly great damage could be done to the lives and finances of anyone whose information was included in the theft.
If you want to find out if your Social Security number was included, something I would highly recommend, there are two online security companies that have set up websites where you can check this for free. One site set up by Atlas Privacy, an online privacy company, can be accessed at https://www.npdbreach.com/. Another by Pentaster is at https://npd.pentester.com/. Unfortunately, when I searched, I found that my data was included, as was that of my wife and son.
Armed with this knowledge, there are some steps you can take to protect yourself.
First, be sure to monitor your credit reports for activity that is unfamiliar or suspicious. The three major credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion and Equifax) will provide you with one free credit report per year. I would do the same for your bank accounts and credit cards. This can alert you that your information is being used surreptitiously.
There are also free sites that will alert you if your email address has been leaked. I use one called “';--have i been pwned?”, which can be found at https://haveibeenpwned.com/.
Another solid idea is to sign up for a credit monitoring service that constantly monitors the major credit bureaus mentioned above and lets you know when something unusual appears to be happening. There are many of these to choose from, which you can find simply by doing an online search for “credit monitoring services”.
If you discover that someone is using your Social Security number, experts say you should freeze your credit immediately. You do this by contacting the big three credit bureaus. Putting a freeze on will make it more difficult for someone to impersonate you and use your information to take out loans, credit cards, etc. You can request to unfreeze your account at any time should you need to do so. While a bit of a hassle, doing this may prevent months if not years of dealing with the pain that identity theft can cause.
I would also highly recommend that you visit the IRS’s Identity Theft Central site (https://www.irs.gov/identity-theft-central) and click on “Taxpayer Guide to Identity Theft”. There you can request an Identity Protection PIN. This 6-dight number is a valuable tool to help prevent data thieves from filing false tax returns using your information. There is a great deal of other valuable information at this IRS site to help you combat identity theft, including employment related theft, where someone may be using your information for employment purposes with the intention of leaving you holding the bag for the income tax liability on the compensation paid to them.
This latest incident arguably is the most serious and capricious theft of personal information yet and points out just how vulnerable we and the systems that store our data really are to bad actors. While nothing can prevent this nor be a foolproof measure to keep you from harm, taking the above actions can go a long way to minimizing the potential damage.
