We’re sorry: we’ve been breached, here’s credit monitoring

Hi folks,
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of these breaches. I don’t think they prove anything. According to Krebs on security a source I look at to keep up with the breach notifications, we’re pretty much seeing a story of one breach a week. I don’t know about you guys, but I think its time to take a stand. Today, I just got a letter from Washington saying that I am one of I don’t know how many people who are potentially breached as part of the Office of Personel Management. On top of that, I remembered where I was signed up before with the last breach, and somehow, the parent company was breached by purchasing a third party contractor or something, from what I remembder. I wonder what, if anything, normal citizens can do to tell these agencies, how important, safeguarding our personal information is.

When I had my customer list through my PC only, I stored it on a database only I had access to. Now, that has shifted to freshbooks who is behind a username and password, and I trust because I’ve not heard of a single incident of identity issues, although, every issue I’ve encountered has been resolved. None of it was a loss of customer data, and none of the people who pay me through the platform, have notified me that they have done anything wrong.

Credit freezes are difficult when you are not making much money. Each credit bureau charges $10 to freeze and unfreeze your credit. This means you’re paying $30 per freeze and $30 per unfreeze. These charges can be difficult and I don’t think it will stop thieves from taking the stuff to begin with. According to Brian, this can prevent new credit lines, bank accounts, and other things that could harm your credit, and in that case, I support it. However, is that the only solution? I believe companies should be held accountable on protecting our most sensitive information such as SSN’s, drivers liscence, and other information that could harm us. Our name and E-mail address may be important, however, its only the beginning. If an agency has to store other info such as SSN, drivers license, and other identifiable info, my honest opinion, don’t store it online. Store it offline, and back it up somewhere such as a trusted service that will keep it safe.

I know if I had to keep my customer database safe, Sendspace may be a good option, because even if you had the free version, the files are not linked unless you publically link to them, and no public directory can be made unless you do it via folder. The route of your account is secured, and even an outsider can’t access that without logging in to the account. If you didn’t want to use that, you could use something like Carbonite which does charge a lot, but you can back up everything. There are other services I’m sure, that could keep your stuff safe.

I don’t expect everything to be 100 percent secure, but I do think personal info that could get you in to trouble should not be easily changed, and if it does need to be changed, phone is the only way, with multi-factor authentication such as SSN, and a security code only used to talk to a representative. I’m only contemplating right now, maybe other people have information that could be of use.

I honestly don’t know what major companies could do, since we are moving toward an online world, but daily or weekly breaches won’t get us anywhere.

If you have any thoughts, E-mail me, or comment through the blog. We’ll be talking about this on podcast 230. Thanks for reading!