The Equifax security breach

http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/11/technology/equifax-identity-theft/

If you haven't heard of this story yet you might want to read into this and google it on your own. Recently the huge credit monitoring company Equifax has been hacked into and half of America's citizens have had their information and identity stolen. This company runs your credit for a loan that you apply for whether it's for a car, student loans or even just a credit card. This means that these hackers now have any information they need to steal your identity which includes your social security number. This means that more than likely all of us have been affected by this and will have a risk of our identities being used to apply for credit cards and loans, ultimately wrecking our credit. This is a huge breach and this company announced this news a few days after the fact giving the public less time to make steps to defend themselves against credit fraud. Whether they waited because they didn't know for those days or because they were embarrassed and didn't want to admit to it at first they were extremely unprofessional. A company of that size with that much information should have much stronger defenses to hackers and should certainly have IT guys monitoring their information integrity every day. There are some steps you can take to protect yourself and here is a link on what is recommended to do. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-how-to-freeze-your-credit-equifax-20170911-story.html