This article was last updated @ 3:00 PM 08/26/2024
Consumer data broker National Public Data has been breached and has exposed hundreds of millions of consumer records. These consumer records include information that is often used to verify consumer identity. The breached data also includes 272M social security numbers of living and deceased US citizens.
You can read more about the breach here:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/08/nationalpublicdata-com-hack-exposes-a-nations-data
and here:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/08/national-public-data-published-its-own-passwords/#more-68428
You can check if your information was part of the breach here:
or here:
Now that the data is in the wild, what can you do about it? Even if your info was not part of this breach the following steps are still important to keep your credit and identity safe.
1. Place a credit freeze with all three of credit bureaus. This will prevent new credit inquiries and new credit card and some loan accounts. This freeze will need to be lifted when establishing new accounts.
https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze
https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services
2. Place a security freeze with ChexSystems. This will prevent the approval of new banking accounts opened in your name. This will also need to be lifted when opening new accounts.
3. Get an Identity Protection Pin for your IRS account. This will prevent someone else from filing a tax return in your name. As enticing as someone filing your taxes for you might sound it can be used in the identity theft process.
4. Review your credit report from each of the credit reporting agencies annually. Due to these large scale data breaches it is important to keep an eye on your credit report. Under federal law you are entitled to a copy of your credit report annually from all three credit reporting agencies – Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.
How to request your free credit report:
- You may contact the Central Source by visiting www.AnnualCreditReport.com
- You can request by phone and call 877-FACTACT
Quick and Easy Way – Enroll in an Identity Theft and Monitoring service. Instead of doing the first 4 steps yourself these services help automate the process plus a whole lot more. I would suggest this for a heavy credit user or someone with an extensive digital and financial footprint. These services are expensive but cover a wide array of credit, banking, and identity services that would be next to impossible to manually opt out of. The two front runners are:
Lifelock – https://lifelock.norton.com/
and
Aura – https://www.aura.com/
You can read more about them here:
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/identity-theft/best-identity-theft-protection/
and
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-identity-theft-protection,review-2083.html
Honorable Mention – There are some services that help to clean up your data from the 100’s or 1000’s of data brokers out there. This type of service is included in the previously mentioned Identity Theft and Monitoring services but you can sign up for this functionality without all of the bells and whistles. A few of the best are:
Delete Me – https://joindeleteme.com/
Incogni – https://incogni.com/
Optery – https://www.optery.com/
I’ll continue to monitor this situation and aggregate the best practices to help mitigate the risk associated with this breach.
Update 8/23/2024
Added best practice number 4.
Update 8/26/2024
Added https://www.npdbreach.com/ site by Atlas Privacy to article
Added Quick and Easy and Honorable Mention section
Formatting changes
