Over the weekend I received a letter from a company called Condulent. Their systems support services for more than 100 million people nationwide including a majority of Fortune 100 companies plus more than 500 government entities. It hacked Medicaid, SNAP, Blue Cross Blue Shield plus data from a number of corporate services. It got our Social Security Numbers, date of birth, and reams of personal identifying data. The danger is that this data exposes those experiencing the breach to long term fraud years from now.

If you received one of these letters, take it seriously. You can put a fraud alert on your accounts, sign up for credit monitoring, or the step I’m going to take, put a credit freeze on all my accounts. That means no one can open new accounts in my name or with my SSN. It’s a pain if you need a new credit card (which most of us probably don’t), but this may be the strongest step you can take to stop identity theft. Make sure you put it on at all three credit bureaus.

Here’s the link from Experian that shows you how to do this. Be sure to call Equifax and Transunion as well.