The Green Sheet Online Edition

April 22, 2024 • Issue 24:04:02

Readers Speak: Commonsense ID protection

Directly after AT&T's March 30, 2024, disclosure that 73 million AT&T customers' accounts had been compromised in a data breach, Odysseas Papadimitriou, CEO of WalletHub and former senior director at CapitalOne, offered the following five tips for readers of The Green Sheet to give to merchants who may voice concerns about the incident:

1. Sign up for 24/7 credit monitoring: This way, you'll find out immediately if someone tries to open an account in your name.
2. Enable two-factor authentication: If you have an AT&T account, start by changing your password and enabling two-factor authentication. Then, enable two-factor authentication on your email and financial accounts. This will make it harder for fraudsters to infiltrate other aspects of your life.
3. A freeze is better than an alert: If you really want to protect yourself from fraudulent borrowing, freeze your three major credit reports (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion). This will prevent anyone but you from accessing them, thus making it impossible to take out a loan or line of credit. A fraud alert, in contrast, doesn't do much.
4. Suppress fraudulent info: While you can dispute run-of-the-mill credit report inaccuracies, it's best to use a process called "suppression"/"blocking" to get rid of negative info resulting from identity theft. This makes it so the records in question can't reappear after they're initially removed.
5. Never respond to unsolicited requests for information: Don't be surprised if you see an uptick in unsolicited calls and emails requesting personal information. Never answer if you didn't ask to be contacted.
6. Consider premium identity protection: There's only so much you can do to protect your identity for free, and with the increased sophistication of fraudsters, consider premium identity protection features like identity theft insurance, premium identity alerts and access to identity restoration experts.

Data security next steps

The payments industry has come a long way since the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard was introduced in 2004. What next steps should the industry take to make our protection of sensitive data even more effective? Share your insights at greensheet@greensheet.com.

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