OKLAHOMA CITY – In March, global communications giant AT&T revealed that they’d suffered a mammoth data breach, potentially compromising the data and personal information of up to 7.6 million customers worldwide. And then, yet another AT&T breach was announced again in June!
While the March breach was a particularly bad one from an uncommonly huge, multinational corporation, these kinds of data breaches and cyberattacks are becoming increasingly frequent at practically all levels of commerce, with most incidents not being reported to the public until much later, often following a lengthy internal investigation.
By the time you’re finally informed that your data has been compromised, it could already be in the hands of scammers and thieves attempting to open new credit accounts, apply for loans, and gain control of your bank accounts or credit cards.
So what should you do if you were a victim of this recent breach or of any breach, and what steps can you take to protect yourself for the future?
Change Passwords
First things first, you probably want to update your online passwords. This should already be a more regular and recurring process for most people than it is, so there’s no better time to jump in and update your passwords than following a breach.
Check your activity
Now, before you panic or start to freeze accounts and cancel all your cards, the very first thing you should do is simply check to see if there’s been any suspicious or concerning activity with your finances.
It could be unexpected charges, unauthorized attempts to access your online accounts, or potentially more major issues like hard hits on your credit from thieves trying to apply for major loans in your name or to transfer access of your accounts to them.
Or it could be nothing.
Even if your data was included in a breach, that doesn’t mean that anyone has used it for nefarious purposes, or even that enough of your information was leaked to be of any use to thieves.
So before you put yourself through the more complicated and intensive steps that come next, first simply check your accounts and determine if you have reason to believe that your data has been used by thieves.
Get new cards, don’t cancel
If you see fraudulent charges made from your credit cards, but you don’t see any evidence of your social security number or deeper financial data being compromised, then know that you do not need to cancel your cards.
Simply report the card stolen, even if you still have the physical card, and request a new one with a new number.
Financial planner Matt Frankel with The Motley Fool reiterates:
“To be clear, there’s no need to cancel your account. Getting a card with a new number makes the old one useless to a thief.”
Beyond that, it’s all about keeping an eye on your credit.
Set up monitoring
If you don’t see any strange activity yet, but you still want to stay vigilant, you can consider a credit monitoring service like Life Lock or Aura. But before you sign up and pay for one of those services, know this:
There have (sadly) been so many major data breaches in recent years that most consumers likely already have free access to credit monitoring services offered in perpetuity by any company that has revealed a breach in the past.
So maybe check back through old emails or reports to see if you’ve already been offered access to free credit monitoring.
There are some free monitoring services you may want to avoid, however, and they might surprise you.
Writing for NerdWallet, Bev O’Shea and Amanda Barroso actually recommend “avoiding the offerings from credit bureaus themselves.”
“Credit bureau monitoring plans typically have an arbitration clause in their terms of service,” they write. “When you sign up, you must waive your right to a class-action lawsuit and agree to binding arbitration, which widely is considered to be against a consumer’s best interests.”
Freeze your credit
If you see any suspicious activity or any blocked or fraudulent charges, now’s the time to freeze your credit.
Scary as it sounds, freezing your credit does not prevent you from using credit or even from building and increasing your credit score. It’s simply a barrier against your credit being checked or approved by lenders, helping to ensure that no new accounts or major financial changes can be made without your direct authorization to unfreeze.
The difficulty here is that all three credit bureaus – TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax – must be contacted individually and a separate request to freeze or unfreeze must be made with each.
The good news is that all three bureaus now offer freeze requests to be made easily online through their websites.
Once a freeze of your credit is in place, you can still use your credit cards and build your credit like normal, but you’ll have to personally unfreeze your credit (either online or by phone) to apply for any new loans or credit lines.
You can even authorize a short temporary unfreeze to buy a new car or apply for a new credit card and then immediately reinstate the freeze.
Be aware, though, that even a credit freeze is never guaranteed to be 100% effective. Thieves are getting better every day at getting around safeguards and protections.
Consider staying frozen
So with the relative ease of freezing your credit online and the mostly painless, if inconvenient, process of authorizing a temporary unfreezing whenever you need it, why not simply keep your credit frozen all the time just for the added security?
Well, that’s becoming more common.
The average consumer only needs to authorize access to their credit sporadically, mostly when buying a new car, moving or buying a new house, or applying for a new credit card or higher credit limit. For the majority of consumers, those events might constitute only once or twice throughout multiple years.
If that sounds like you, then you might consider keeping a freeze on your credit as a standard practice, only lifting it temporarily when you know that you’re about to need it.
Even Forbes advisors agree.
“Now that credit freezes are free, there is little reason not to do it,” Forbes contributor Camilo Maldonado wrote. “The process of establishing and lifting a credit freeze can be inconvenient. But it’s nothing compared to the headache of dealing with someone opening accounts in your name.”
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Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.