What’s the Point of Credit Monitoring When the Credit Bureaus are Getting Hacked?

This is a daily opinion column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder of How-To Geek, featuring his take on the latest in the world of technology.

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Experian Hacked, T-Mobile Customer Data Stolen

Today, credit reporting and marketing company Experian announced they were the victim of a data breach that affects approximately 15 million U.S. consumers, including any T-Mobile customer who went through a credit check for service or device financing.
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This information includes names, dates of birth, addresses, and Social Security numbers (or alternate forms of ID like drivers’ licenses), as well as other information that may have been used in T-Mobile’s credit assessment.

Their solution to leaking all of your personal information is to give you two years of credit monitoring for free. Yes, that’s right. First, they lose all of your data. Then they offer to monitor your data for free. Of course, in order to do that you have to sign up and give them your social security number, which you may not have given them in the first place.

Credit monitoring is ridiculous. They are effectively saying “Pay us to monitor your file or we’ll let somebody open up an account in your name.”

The really messed up thing here is that most of the people that sign up for the 2 years of free credit monitoring will end up probably decide to pay. So in the long run, Experian might get more customers out of this.

And that’s why I don’t want to participate in this system. But do you have any option? Nope. You’re automatically enrolled, and then they are legally allowed to sell some of your information to other companies, which is how you get all those credit card offers in the mail. Do they verify it’s really you when giving out your credit report? Nope. These days you can get a credit card by just filling out an application with some information and a social security number.

Luckily there is one way that you can opt out — instead of putting a fraud alert on your credit, you can completely freeze it so nobody can access it.

A billion Android phones are vulnerable to new Stagefright bugs

There’s a new round of Stagefright vulnerabilities that allows attackers to execute malicious code on more than one billion phones running ancient as well as much more recent versions of Google’s Android operating system.

The fact that most Android phones don’t get patches regularly is starting to catch up to Android. At this point if you aren’t using a Nexus device where patches are provided directly from Google, you probably are going to be vulnerable.

Seems to me that it is only a matter of time before a worm infects millions of phones.