Credit Bureau Suffers Id Theft of over 3,000

TransUnion, one of the three major U.S. credit
bureaus, was itself the victim in a latest of many
recent security breaches which have forced
congressional attention to identity theft fraud.

According to the Washington Post, the social security
numbers (SSN) and "other information" were stolen last
month from a laptop located in a regional sales office
in California.

3,623 notices were sent to consumers alerting them to
the breach.

Under California law companies doing business there
must issue a consumer disclosure when there's been a
security breach involving personal data.

Otherwise, we might not have even learned of this
latest id security breach,as our U.S. Congress has
been favoring legislation which leaves the offending
company with the option to issue a consumer disclosure
(more to follow on this with our
next posting).

TransUnion, however, elected to disclose the security
breach and to also provide additional assistance to
those consumers effected.

TransUnion is offering free credit monitoring to those
consumers to help prevent identity theft or
ssn fraud.

So, today's tip is an alert that you can still
contact TransUnion to get a free credit report as part
of your consumer right for id theft protection
even if you were not directly effected by this breach.