Major breach of SSN data reported by LA Times

If someone wants to steal my identity they can hose the duck crap off my drivewway and that would be great, thanks.

Mine's clear, but the wife has one from College back in 1996. Nothin newer. 

They have me in the system but all of the addresses are old and none of the DOBs are correct. Kind of strange. 

Am I the only one who saw the thread title and thought of espionage and the new Columbia-class boomers?

So, based on this, I finally decided to freeze my credit (using the links above).  To do that, you need to register at each of the services, with slightly varying degrees of difficulty (finding the link to freeze on Transunion was made wildly unnecessarily difficult).  Using the links provided above to go directly to those pages should help a lot.

The slightly disturbing part is that all you really need to register (and thus freeze) is a SSN (note: NOT a nuke sub! ), a name, and an address (is this sounding familiar?).  Well, they do do some extra checks to make sure it is you.... which is mostly asking about previous addresses....

So, yes, the database that was hacked, seems to be the same database that the credit services use to verify who you are.

I would really suggest everyone at least register to these credit services (make sure to adjust your preferences to kill the spam mails, because they REALLY want to sell you things) because it would be REALLY easy for someone else to do do that for you at this point!  I would also suspect, and hope, that verifying who you are to these services might get a lot more difficult in the future.

Of note is that Equifax is the only one that is actually sending me physical mail to verify who I am.

Additional, kind of scary note:  If you are having issues remembering where you lived 20 years ago and when... check the hack link....!

The PIRG link observes that it can be a bit quicker to call than to use the websites because of the overhead of registering, but there's also the observation that a leak like this actually is more likely to give someone access to a banking account that doesn't already have an online login associated with it, because it's harder to change the email address than to provide one during registration. I rolled with the logic that it's better to own the online accounts at all three credit reporting agencies, and that it's worth taking the time to do that registration.

It all gives me significant heebie-jeebies, but I'm glad it prodded me into setting up freezes given that according to a podcast I heard this morning, this bunch of personal data is largely a duplicate of a bunch of other stuff that had already happened... That is, in all likelihood the data was already out there, this is just all of it at once.

RevRico said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

It wasn't all that long ago that it was encouraged to engrave your SSN on tools for identification purposes. The master plumber that trained me had his on every single socket, wrench, and tool he owned. 

Ok, scratch that, I guess it was like 60 years ago that was encouraged. 

Years ago I did asbestos air monitoring during abatement projects.  We had to take down the SSN of whomever wore the personnel air sampling pumps.  Nobody ever balked.  I wouldn't even ask them for it now.  

RevRico said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

It wasn't all that long ago that it was encouraged to engrave your SSN on tools for identification purposes. The master plumber that trained me had his on every single socket, wrench, and tool he owned. 

Ok, scratch that, I guess it was like 60 years ago that was encouraged. 

Yeah, I remember my Dad engraving his SSN on the stereo, TV, etc. We're OLD.

I guess it was in the 80's that it was commonplace to have your SSN printed on your checks along with name and address.  If it wasn't there, almost everyone that accepted your personal check for payment was going to ask for your SSN anyway.