Equifax breached ... 140 million accounts. The worse breach in history.

Agreed. Their algorithms are scary, in a good way for me. Twice in 3 years I’ve had my stolen number used to buy something. Both times the company texted me within an hour or so. The nature of the charges weren’t something that I would think was out of the ordinary for me…I travel a lot, and these were charges in neighboring states at big-name stores, but somehow it smelled bad to them.

Granted, they also texted me 2 times for charges I DID make, within minutes, and a simple text response was enough to free up the card again. Both were with NewEgg.com … I guess they’ve had a lot of fraud with people buying stuff there with stolen numbers.

What are you guys doing to store your PINs? I just realized I have to figure something out, lol.

What happens if you don’t have the PIN when it comes time to unfreeze? Has anyone had that happen?

Paper always works. And it’s immune to being hacked too, so long as you don’t actually hold it up to your webcam…

You can request a new PIN to be sent via mail but you’ll have to wait for it.

I put it in LastPass with everything else confidential.

And Smith is out.

Smith’s salary for 2016 was $1.45 million and his bonus was $3.045 million.

Seems forced out by the board. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess he got a nice parachute as part of it. The board is trying to stop the blood flow, but I’d be quite happy seeing the entire company bleed to death. As more and more comes out, it appears more than just lack of security preparation, and more callousness toward doing things as they should. In fact it feels more like someone inside knew all of this and perhaps wanted the whole damned place to burn to the ground.

Like someone had their stapler stolen.

It’s almost as if these huge financial institutions should be tightly regulated or something.

Pshaw!

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha…

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

This is fine.

That relates to their core business, those questions about your past that supposedly establish you are who you say you are. You know, “Have you lived at any of the following addresses”, “Did you have a car loan in 1995”, and so on. All the shit the hackers stole.

The problem here is really that those questions are not effective at establishing identity. Even if they weren’t stolen en masse, credit reporting agencies like Equifax had to get that information from somewhere in the first place-- it is widely available, and with a small amount of effort it’s not difficult to discover if Bill Sullivan from Sweet Oak, Iowa lived at 440 Sun Lane in Tuscaloosa in 1997.

The answer to this problem is a national ID card with tokenized authentication mechanism additionally secured by a second factor, a changeable PIN. To steal someone’s identity you would need their physical card and their PIN. The physical verification would only be required when establishing new lines of credit, renewing your drivers license, starting a business, or the first time you file your taxes. It acts as a cryptographic signature verifying you are who you say you are.

Unrelated but credit appropriate, I mentioned upthread that one of my cards was compromised. As it turns out, three coworkers and one other family member have had the same thing happen in the last two weeks.

I smell another hack announcement. I guess we will see soon enough.

Quite possible - probably a chain you all frequent.

One in North Dakota, one in West Virginia, and two in North Carolina. That doesn’t exclude something down here though, because all of those outside of my state come down here for travel.

Could be Target, again (or something similar). Credit bureaus don’t have card numbers unless you paid them, so it likely wouldn’t be Equifax.

Target, home depot, chipotle, IHG hotels, many enormous national chains were hacked. Your credit card is absolutely in the wild already. If you don’t see fraudulent charges today, that’s just because you got lucky not to be picked.

Stusser, to what you said, I switched a few year ago to attempt to have a local versus travel only card routine. This was the travel card, so that leaves things wide open. Really it would have mattered either way, you end up using those same huge chains at some point, just as you mentioned.

It’s no big deal if your credit card is stolen, they just take care of it. It isn’t all ice cream and blowjobs, not your best day ever, but no need for major stress.

Identity theft, that’s a different matter entirely.