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If you’re like most Canadians, you check your credit score often. As proof of your creditworthiness, this number is an important financial tool. You need to show it to potential employers, landlords, and lenders to demonstrate you can be trusted to make regular payments on time.

Equifax is one of the most popular credit services Canadians use to check their scores. They input confidential contact and financial information into its website to determine where they stand. The information shared is exactly what paper shredding Toronto businesses aim to destroy with our mobile shredders.

Unfortunately, the credit-monitoring company was victim of a cyberattack in the spring of this year. Equifax discovered the breach at the end of July, and, after internal investigation, it reveals the breach exposed over 143 million Equifax customers’ PI — many of whom are Canadians.

By exploiting a part of the US’ faction’s website, cyber criminals accessed contact details, as well as social security numbers and birthdates of Equifax customers. In some cases, even drivers licence numbers were included in the stolen cache of information.

This information is necessary for Equifax and other credit-monitoring companies to create an accurate profile, so credit reporting is one the rare times you should share this data. As one of the best shredding companies in Vaughan, we recommend sharing PI carefully, as even trusted names can experience a leak. Never share this information with any company or individual unless they have the appropriate security measures in place. Use our shredding services to destroy everything else to ensure it can’t be retrieved and used again you.

According to Avivah Litan, a security analyst for the search and advisory firm, Gartner Inc, this incident is significant. He puts the breach into perspective, saying, “On a scale of 1 to 10, this is a 10 in terms of potential identity theft”.

Historically, this breach is one of the biggest ones to occur in the US. With 143 million potential victims, it’s just behind eBay, which suffered a cyberattack that affected 145 million customers in 2014. Both incidences are far behind Yahoo. In 2013, over 1 billion of the web service’s user accounts were compromised.

Though it’s not the worst breach to affect North America, the attack’s fallout is a blow to the company’s credibility. In addition to millions of people now made vulnerable, the company itself is facing consequences. After Equifax announced the breach, its stock dropped by 13 percent. The long-term effects of this breach remain to be seen.

To see if you were one of the people affected, head to equifaxsecurity2017.com. The company developed this website so customers could check the potential impact of the breach. You can also call them at 866-447-7559 to learn more about the attack.

Once you confirm your PI is safe, this is a good time to put in place the right defences against other future attacks. There may be nothing you can do to protect yourself from these large-scale cyberattacks targeting a company as large as Equifax, but you can take the necessary steps to defend your personal information with a call to our offices.

Call us and schedule our paper shredding and  electronic data destruction services to increase the security around your private information. Together, we’ll keep your PI safe from prying eyes.