482-The Equifax Data Breach: Background, How It Affects You, and the Minimum Steps You Need to Take to Protect Yourself
Radical Personal Finance
Joshua J. Sheats, MSFS, CFP, CLU, ChFC, CASL, RHU, REBC, CAP
4.2 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2017
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today we tackle the Equifax security breach. This is the most damaging release of personal information ever. And you need to take it seriously.
You must assume that you have been affected. At this point, I see no reason to even trust the official Equifax website. Here's why.
- Clark Howard's excellent credit freeze guide: http://clark.com/personal-finance-credit/credit-freeze-and-thaw-guide/
- Another excellent one by the Justin Carroll and Michael Bazzell: https://privacy-training.com/CreditFreeze.pdf
- I forgot to mention this on the show, but here's a link for those of you who are readers of the resources. The IRS seems to use social media to find people committing tax fraud.
Source: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/08/the-irs-is-mining-taxpayer-data-on-social-media-in-violation-of-federal-privacy-law.html - The official Equifax response website: www.equifaxsecurity2017.com
- Why the Equifax breach is possibly the worst leak of personal information ever.
- What should you do if your data was hacked?
- The novel I mentioned: True Faith And Allegiance, a Tom Clancy novel by Mark Greaney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today on Medical Personal Finance I am preempting the normal Friday Q&A show in order to talk about |
| 0:06.8 | the recent awful Equifax Data Breach. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, |
| 0:31.0 | skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. Today we need to talk about risk management, part of that Avoid Catastrophe component of the Radical Personal Finance |
| 0:45.0 | Rubric |
| 0:46.0 | Equifax has released your public data to hackers |
| 0:51.0 | and we need to talk about what you can or should do about it. |
| 0:57.0 | This week, actually last week going on just over a week ago, Equifax came out and released the information that they had been hacked and a very serious hack. |
| 1:09.0 | They talked about the fact that almost 150 million people have had their personal data stolen from Equifax servers, |
| 1:16.4 | depending on the account about 200,000 people's specific credit card numbers and the data that has been released is extremely |
| 1:25.0 | damaging. The data that's been released is very damaging because it includes |
| 1:29.0 | not only your Social Security number but your name, your date of birth, your social security number, but your name, your date of birth, your social security |
| 1:35.4 | number, your address, your driver's license, etc. This is probably the most damaging |
| 1:42.0 | hack as far as the most damaging public data release of |
| 1:48.0 | really almost any any data and that's saying something. It's not necessarily the biggest as of the moment |
| 1:54.2 | Equifax claims that the personal records of a hundred and forty three million users in the United |
| 1:59.2 | States, Canada and I believe England primarily have been released so 143 million. That's not the biggest |
| 2:07.0 | data breach. There was a few years ago a Yahoo data breach of about 500 million people's use personal information and another one I can't remember the exact number but a couple hundred million |
| 2:18.1 | really damaging a couple years ago the United States Office of Personnel Management |
| 2:22.9 | released the records of over 200,000 US service personnel |
| 2:27.2 | who had had security classification clearances |
| 2:31.2 | with the US government. |
| 2:32.2 | They released all that information through two hackers. |
... |
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