Last week saw an inauspicious beginning to Cybersecurity Awareness Month with user data compromises announced at:

scottrade

Now you are aware of Cybersecurity. What next?  You can’t fix your vendors. You can have some more free credit monitoring to augment the free monitoring you got when Anthem lost your records, or Target, or Neiman Marcus, or The Office of Personnel Management, or 

[fill in the blank].

Let’s look at how credit monitoring protects you.  There are several steps:

  1. The bad guy steals your data
  2. The bad guy does something to hurt you
  3. The monitoring company captures the bad activity
  4. The bad activity appears on a monitoring report
  5. You recognize the bad thing on the report
  6. You initiate remediation

A key step in this process is you must sustain damage. Monitoring kicks in after you are damaged.

For a few bucks, you can actually do something to protect yourself. You can put a step between stealing your data and identity theft. As Brian Krebs describes in How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Security Freeze, you can put a freeze on your credit that does a lot to prevent identity theft.  In addition to monitoring services, consider the value of the Security Freeze.