Hi All –

By now, most of you have heard about the Equifax breach. Equifax is one of the big three that provide credit history and scores to creditors if you apply for a loan, credit card, etc. It is estimated that the data of up to 148 MILLION accounts was compromised.

With these numbers, it is very likely that your data may have been involved. If they get your CC info, that’s not too bad because most Credit Card Companies will forgive purchases not made by you.
The big danger is if they get your Social Security number. Then they can open new accounts as you, make large purchases and involve you in a very nasty, expensive legal struggle. That is what Identity Theft is.

There are a few things you can do to minimize this risk. Equifax is offering a 1 year Credit Watch subscription free of charge to anyone that asks for it, and you can go to their website and see if your information was part of the hack – www.equifaxsecurity2017.com . At the site, choose enroll to sign up for the notification and credit watch.

If you don’t feel comfortable signing up with them, you could go to Experian www.experian.com or Transunion www.transunion.com , (the other two of the big three), and shop their protection services, or better yet Lifelock - www.lifelock.com is one of the largest identity theft protection companies out there.

With a hack of this size on a company that I’m pretty sure already has your social security number, I urge you to take a few of these steps to protect your identity before something bad happens. Being 1 in 148 million is NOT protection.

Let us know if you need any more info, or if we can help in any way.

Regards,

Brian MacFee
Ofc 781.837.0069
Cell 617-678-0345
www.systemsupport.com