Krebsonsecurity.com: Many readers wrote in this past week to say they’d finally been officially notified that their fingerprints, background checks, Social Security numbers, and other sensitive information was jeopardized in the massive data breach discovered this year at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
Almost as many complained that the OPM’s response — the offering of free credit monitoring services for up to three years — won’t work if readers have taken my advice and enacted a “security freeze” on one’s credit file with the major credit bureaus.
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The article goes on to discuss the fact that this is proof that a credit freeze is the best method available to consumers to prevent ID theft, while the free credit monitoring cannot prevent identity theft, but merely alert individuals that it has happened.
There are some funny analogies in the full article, but Krebs likens disabling your credit freeze to enable credit monitoring to "leaving your doors and windows unlocked so that burglars can set off your indoor motion sensors."
Moral of the story: don't trust the credit monitoring services. Freeze your credit with all three of the reporting agencies today.