Opinion: Be proactive About Protecting Your Financial Data

Entrust Wealth Management always holds the best interest of their clients at the forefront whether you are a current client or considering working with us. As you may have heard there was a massive data breach at one of the three credit agencies, Equifax. We have received numerous questions on whether their information has been compromised.   

We wanted to make you aware of the situation and advise you on the best way to protect yourself. This is something I have done and I recommend you do the same.  

This breach is unrelated to Entrust Wealth Management, although it did affect over 143 million people. Unlike many other breaches that exposed only the username and password used on a particular website, Equifax has a huge amount of non-public information used to report on credit worthiness. The breach exposed a great deal of information such as your name, SSN, DOB, and other information that cannot be changed like a password.  

The best thing that can be done to protect against this breach is a credit freeze.  

Good news: Identity thieves will have a very hard time using your information to obtain credit in your name. If fraudulent credit is obtained in your name, it is very time consuming to get off your credit report.

Bad news: You need to freeze your file at each credit bureau. You may have to pay a fee to do this. You will be issued a PIN that will be required every time you want to “thaw” your credit file in order to obtain credit that you legitimately request (e.g. car loan, mortgage, etc.). You will need to thaw your file at the particular credit bureau(s) that the credit grantor uses. For example, a car dealer may only query TransUnion. You’ll need to find this out first, then request the thaw, then obtain the credit, and then re-freeze your file.

The second best thing to do is to enable 2 factor authentication on every website that supports it. If your information was compromised at Equifax (and it probably was), thieves will know most information needed to unlock accounts using a ‘forgot password’ link. 2 factor authentication takes only a few minutes to set up.

If you would like to learn more to greatly reduce your risk of being victimized by identity thieves, you can call Entrust Wealth Management at 223-4024 or visit them at 35 Lake St. in Owego.