What is Data Breach

Data Breach occurs when companies that are storing your information intentionally or unintentionally releases secure information to an environment that is not trustworthy. It is a security incident in which confidential data is copied, stolen, or used by someone that is not authorized to do so. This can involve financial information, personal health information, trade secrets of a corporation or personal identification information. There is no way you can prevent a data breach unfortunately but here are some things you can do if you that the company has had a data breach.

1. Contact the company or organization that suffered the breach and ask what credit protection the company plans to provide. Also make sure that you ask as to what extent your personal information is at risk.
2. Contact any affected financial companies that have your credit card accounts, bank accounts, or investment accounts and ask that your accounts be closed immediately and a new one opened. You can place a fraud alert on those accounts but those alerts will not be affected by opening a new account.
3. Make sure that you are monitoring your credit and banking statements closely and check to make sure that every charge and expenditure is legitimate. If something does not match up, file a fraudulent charge notification.
4. File a fraud alert with all three credit bureaus because they are required by law to flag your credit report for 90 days. You should then be notified if someone tries to open a new account using your credit information.
5. Since data breaches have become so common it might be advisable to sign up for any free credit monitoring that is offered.

There are data breach notification laws but most of them will say that if a certain number of records are compromised, then all that is necessary is a public announcement of the breach. You may not even receive a notification about the breach. The only way you may find out is if you watch the news, read the newspapers, or someone tells you.

There is a “loophole” in breach notification laws which state that if the data is encrypted, the encryption key has not been lost, and then the information is secure even if it is lost or stolen. You may never find out that the company lost your information but it is no big deal since the information cannot be accessed anyway unless the identity thieves have an encryption key.

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