Diary of a Network Geek

Your credit information has likely been stolen.

As you’ve probably read in the news, or heard on telly, Equifax, one of the three largest U.S. credit bureaus, was hacked earlier this month, exposing over 143 million American’s personal information. And, trust me, no matter how bad it sounds, it is most assuredly worse than you think. What’s more, it seems like this breach was strictly due to negligence on the part of one of their system administrators, who didn’t keep up to date with patches on some of their backend software, leaving them vulnerable to the attack. But, unless you’re a professional geek like me, you probably don’t care about that. Rather, what you care about is what to do next.

Luckily, Consumer Reports has some suggestions on how to respond to the breach of your personal data, and they’re pretty good suggestions. Thankfully, since my wife and I recently refinanced our house to get out of most of our consumer debt, I have some credit monitoring already in place. If you don’t though, now is a good time to get that going. And, as always, it’s best to keep a close eye on your credit reports and bank accounts regularly. Breach or no breach, that’s just a good habit to get into these days. Identity theft is big business in the digital underworld. It’s unfortunately a “growth business”.

But, none of those are the links I’m really intent on sharing with you this week. No, this week, the very important link I have for you is via Boing Boing and it’s a chatbot that will help you sue Equifax for your loss of privacy and personal data. It’s not available for all states yet, just the ones that have class-action lawsuits filed already, but I’m sure more states will be “piling on”, as we used to say in Chicago, in the coming months. Also, the app is being hit pretty hard, as you can imagine with almost 45% of all U.S. Citizens potentially being effected by this breach. There are a lot of people that might be trying to use this chatbot!

So, hang in there and good luck! And, come back next week for something a little lighter to take your mind off the financial trouble of almost half the U.S.

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words.

This week I’ve got two very serious freebies for you.

Security, as some of you may know, is near and dear to my heart.
In my day job, I’m a system administrator and constantly worried about security.  It’s a huge issue.  Lately, you all may have been hearing news stories about the “Heartbleed SSL vulnerability” which, in theory, could endanger your personal login information, as well as other account credentials or other things you’d want to keep private.  It’s not entirely clear…
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I don’t know about you, but I love free stuff.

I do a lot of stuff on the web every day.  Yeah, I know you can’t tell that from how neglected this blog is these days, especially compared to the old days when I was posting pretty much every day, but, trust me, I’m always buzzing around the web doing something.  Sometimes, it’s building websites like this one.  Not very pretty, but pretty functional and sometimes, not even sites for me.  When I build a site, I generally leave it to the owners to come up with the actual content and just help them get the framework setup, including all the legalese that seems to be pretty much de rigueur these days.
Well, now, thanks to PriorityDigital.com, I think I have a slightly better solution.  They have a page of free utilities that include a Privacy Policy Builder, a Disclaimer Builder and a Non-Disclosure Agreement Maker, among others.  So now, you, or I, can go to these utilities and fill in a few relevant details and quickly get a fairly generic, but still useful, privacy policy, general website disclaimer or non-disclosure agreement without having to pay a lawyer!  Granted, they are pretty generic, but, still, for most of us, they’ll handily take care of our needs.

So, okay, yeah, kind of lame for a Friday, but, still it might give you a little something extra for your side project this weekend.
Enjoy!