Top 3 Things You Should do to Protect Your Identity
On August 6th, 2024, most, if not all, of the US population’s personal information was leaked by hackers that stole the information from National Public Data back in April. According to NPD’s website, they provide criminal records, background checks and more; the more may now include helping hackers take over your identity.
What does this mean for the average American? Not a lot really. So many breaches have happened over the past several years that almost all our data is and was already for sale on the Dark Web. The only difference here is that the hacking group responsible, USDoD, published the complete list and made it available for free.
This will certainly lead to even more scammers and hackers using this data for nefarious purposes. The data leaked included name, mailing address, Social Security Numbers, and date of birth. This data can easily be combined with other hacked data sources to connect email addresses, passwords, and other sensitive information to create what hackers call a FULLZ, slang for “full information” on you.
Should you do anything to better protect yourself from these hackers and scammers? 100% YES. The top three things you should do, in priority, are as follows.
- Freeze Your Credit
You should freeze your credit today. It keeps a scammer from being able to take out credit in your name, which is the most damaging aspect of identity theft. There is no reason not to do it. The three primary credit reporting bureaus are Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. They all do this for free and it is easy to unfreeze and refreeze when you want to buy a new car, open a credit card, or refinance your house.
- Use a Password Manager
If you don’t want to spend any money, there are free ones available in Google Chrome or Apple Keychain. Better yet, spend a few bucks and buy 1Password, Bitwarden or Keeper. Wired has a great article on the best options for free and paid along with reasons to use a paid version.
- Sign Up for Online Banking
This sounds counter intuitive, but for every financial service you have, banking, brokerage, 401K, 529, etc., you need to sign up for the online service. It is much easier for a hacker to sign up for these online services than it is to crack, steal or otherwise connive you out of an existing username and password. Especially if you use a password manager and every password for every login is different and 24 random characters. You only need to remember one password.
Bottom line you need to take personal responsibility for securing your identity regardless of what the next big breach is, and there will be another. It is not a question of if, but when.
Image: This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND