Hacked!

I received a mailing last week – the type with perforated ends and side that must be torn off one by one before you can get to the letter. Lately some mailers like that have been ads, so I almost threw this one out unread, but my intuition told me to open it. I thought it might contain a new PIN number for one my family’s credit cards.

Good thing I did.

An elaborate seal proclaimed “United States Office of Personnel Management” located in Washington, D.C. 20415. The letter began:

Dear [my full name],
As you may know, the Office of Personnel Management was the target of a malicious cyber intrusion carried out against the U.S. Government, which resulted in the theft of background investigation records.

Yes, I knew of the massive data breach, but had no idea my husband and I would be affected. My husband’s work for a large company required security clearances for which he submitted a lot of personal information. He was required to submit information on me as his spouse.

The letter goes on to say that data stolen included my name, Social Security number, address, date and place of birth, and in some cases citizenship.

Aaaaack! I’ve been hacked. This isn’t the typical theft of a credit card number. We experienced one of those just last month when $3,500 worth of services and merchandise were fraudulently charged to my husband’s credit card. It was a minor inconvenience to cancel the card and monitor the account. This time, my entire identity – and my husband’s – is at risk of being maliciously cloned by whoever buys this hacked data when it goes up for sale on the dark web.

But the government is offering not only credit monitoring, but also identity theft insurance and something called “identity restoration service coverage.”

Paranoia seems to run deep. In signing up for our identity protection on the web they caution us not to hand-type the website address as another set of hackers may try to grab our personal data through shadow sites with names just one character off from the legitimate site.

Oh, and we sign up for these services with a 25-digit PIN. Hoo boy! This is going to be fun.