LoanCare, a major, national home mortgage servicing company recently disclosed that it had suffered a data breach affecting 1.3 million of its customers. Sensitive information stolen included names, addresses, Social Security numbers and loan numbers. Having your Social Security number compromised is particularly troublesome since it can readily be used to make you a victim of identity theft. Additionally, information such as your loan number can be used by the cybercriminals to help craft spear phishing emails to lure victims into providing personal information or clicking on infected links in emails. Be particularly wary of emails that appear to come from LoanCare which cybercriminals send to lure people into clicking on infected links or providing personal information. Here is a link to LoanCare’s information from its website about the data breach. https://incident.loancareinfo.com/
As I have reminded you many times, we are only as safe and secure as the security of the companies, government agencies and websites that have our personal information. So even if you are extremely diligent in protecting your personal information, you can be in danger of identity theft and scams if your personal information falls into the hands of hackers.
So what can you do to protect yourself from these data breaches that will be occurring?
TIPS
One important lesson is to limit the amount of personal information that you provide to companies and websites whenever possible. For example, your doctor doesn’t need your Social Security number for his or her records. Unfortunately, loan servicing companies do need your Social Security number.
You should make sure that you have a unique password for each of your online accounts so that if one of your passwords is compromised in a data breach, all of your accounts will not be in danger. If your information is compromised in a data breach, you should immediately change the password for that account.
If you have not already done so, set up dual factor authentication for each of you accounts where it is available. This will protect you from having those accounts stolen by someone who may have access to your password.
Freezing your credit is something everyone should do. It is free and easy to do. In addition, it protects you from someone using your identity to obtain loans or make large purchases even if they have your Social Security number. If you have not already done so, put a credit freeze on your credit reports at all of the major credit reporting agencies. Here are links to each of them with instructions about how to get a credit freeze:
https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/ https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze/place-credit-freeze
https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
Even after freezing your credit reports, you should still regularly monitor them to look for indications of identity theft which you can now do for free on a weekly basis using this link https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action
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