Chloe Villa-Abrille 9/10/17 | Hackers Steal Information from 143 million Americans

Those who use Equifax are in serious danger of vital and personal information being stolen, and it's not just those who use Equifax are impacted. Equifax tracks and controls anyone who’s opened up a bank account, or applied for a loan or mortgage, meaning if you’ve done one of these there’s a chance you might be affected.  So far citizens addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates, and driver licenses have been compromised by hackers, and they also have access to 209,000 credit card numbers. All of this information is immensely sensitive data that cannot be simply changed, and once it’s sold of on the black market there is little that you can do to protect your self. The most you can do right now is sign up for credit monitoring or identity theft protection or even put your credit on freeze, but these precautions can only protect you for a year, meaning if your data is still in the hands of the seller by the end of the year, there really is nothing you can do. The most concerning part is this whole ordeal is identity theft, while this can easily happen if personal information was stolen, most hackers aim towards credit theft as a means to illegally make money under the anonymity from a computer. 

Written by Katie Lobosco this article is meant to inform all of those who have been attacked, since this type of news isn’t quite mentioned as often and is some what difficult to find the details about, for example the hackers haven’t even been found and who specifically has been attacked cannot be specified making news like this slightly ambiguous. This layer of unclarified data makes hacking an even more dangerous type of attack, especially with the internet being more widely used with confidential personal information is stored online. Hacking can also have an affect a nation, such as the controversial event of Russian hackers being tied to the US 2016 elections. Over all hackers and cyber attacks can have a big impact over our country or even an individual and need to be dealt with correctly to avoid disaster.

Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/09/pf/what-to-do-equifax-hack/index.html