The online con artists and hackers will be lining up in droves for this one. And hitting your email mailbox hard.
On Thursday the Credit Reporting Bureau, Equifax reported that they have suffered a massive data breach in which 143 million Americans have had their credit data stolen. This information includes Social Security Numbers, Drivers License numbers and most of your basic account information on file with the credit bureau. The potential for abuse should be obvious. Crooks can take this information and steal your identity to create credit card accounts run up massive debts and vanish leaving you with a major mess to clean up.
As this is major news the hackers will, of course, use your fear of credit fraud to trick you into opening virus laden emails in hopes of capturing passwords.
What to do about it?
- Check with Equifax and see if your information is part of the data breach. You can do so at https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/
- Don’t open emails that are warning about Equifax. If you have an account with Equifax use the link above to check your status. NEVER CLICK ON LINKS in an email.
- Update your antivirus. If you don’t have an antivirus get one now.
- Get a good spam filter. We have several spam solutions for your business such as Office 365. Switching your business to Office 365 for email can dramatically reduce your spam and virus risk with the built in protection from Microsoft.
- Use a good ad block program in your web browser. At N-Line we recommend Ublock Origin for Google Chrome.