Equifax Says Cyberattack May Have Hit 143 Million Customers (Bloomberg)

That’s 60% of all US adults, or pretty much everyone with a credit card. There is a big file floating around somewhere that has enough info on you for anyone to take out a bunch of money in your name and dump that debt on you. You can prevent that by putting a credit freeze on your personal info, which you can lift when you need to apply for credit yourself – here is an FTC link on how to do all three.

The most maddening thing about this leak is that – unlike Ashley Madison – this time you cannot opt out of this shit or “just stop doing it”. If you are a functioning human in USA, you are pretty much forced to store your most sensitive financial and personal info with these scumbags, and then they go on and leak all of it. I hope they get sued to death for being a bunch of incompetent de facto extortionists.

Of course, it’s another issue altogether that what used to be called impersonation and bank’s failure to verify its borrower, the same thing now is referred to by an idiotic oxymoron identity theft and somehow it became not the bank’s problem but yours.