Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
Back in 2017, Equifax announced that hackers stole half of the US population’s Social Security numbers in what, we said, “will likely end up being one of the worst data breaches to ever affect the country.” Perhaps — until this year, when about 2.9 billion rows of data were collected through a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a company that resells collected personal data for background checks. This data included names, Social Security numbers, and other personal information.
As usual, when this sort of thing hits the news, our immediate reaction is to wonder what we can do to prevent ourselves from falling prey to identity theft, unauthorized withdrawals, false credit applications, and other nasty consequences. And, also, as…
