{"id":91417,"date":"2018-09-04T15:00:23","date_gmt":"2018-09-04T22:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/securingtomorrow.mcafee.com\/?p=91417"},"modified":"2025-08-13T01:05:02","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T08:05:02","slug":"equifax-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mcafee.com\/blogs\/privacy-identity-protection\/equifax-anniversary\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look Back at the Equifax Data Breach, One Year Later"},"content":{"rendered":"

WannaCry, Petya, and Equifax first come to mind when you think of the most impactful cyber events in recent years, with the first-year anniversary of the latter coming up September 7th<\/sup>. Impacting nearly 150 million Americans (essentially half the country), the breach changed the nature of identity theft<\/a>. Now, just before its anniversary, let\u2019s take a look back on the impact of the Equifax data breach<\/a>, what it all means for consumers, and the current state of identity theft.<\/p>\n

Equifax reported that the breach exposed as many as 147.9 million consumer accounts, potentially compromising information such as names, dates of birth, addresses, and Social Security numbers.<\/p>\n

To its credit, Equifax launched a program<\/a> to alert potentially affected consumers that their data may have been exposed, and offered a free year subscription to its credit monitoring<\/a> service, TrustID.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, identity theft breaches<\/a> are not an uncommon occurrence. Such incidents are up 44% overall with 1,579 reports last year, and there are likely even more that went unreported. Exposed records due to data breaches are up 389%. Roughly 179 million records have been stolen, with 14.2 million credit card numbers exposed in 2017, an 88% increase over 2016. What\u2019s more, 158 million Social Security numbers were exposed last year, an increase of more than 8 times from 2016. And all this theft has added up \u2013 consumers reported $905 million in total fraud losses last year, a 21% increase. So, it only makes sense that identity theft ranked as roughly 14% of all consumer complaints to the FTC last year.<\/p>\n

However, despite all the publicity about major data breaches, consumers have done very little or have changed very little largely due to optimism bias. In fact, a recent McAfee survey<\/a> shows that despite increased consumer concerns, only 37% of individuals use an identity theft protection solution and 28% have no plans to sign up for an ID theft protection solution.<\/p>\n

Tips to Avoid Identity Theft<\/h2>\n

So now the next question is, what should consumers do to protect themselves against identity theft? Start by following these tips:<\/p>\n