Dealing with financial stuff is already on my list of least-favorite activities, but when you pair that with a security breach at the Oregon State DMV, it’s just doubly frustrating. See, it turns out that identification information for 3.5 million Oregonians was being shuffled around on a file transfer platform called MOVEit, which recently had a series of security vulnerabilities disclosed.

(Let’s just pretend I wrote a very lengthy rant asking why, in the name of all that’s holy, ID info for millions of citizens was being shuffled around on the Internet without being, oh, at the very least, encrypted in some meaningful fashion. It’s late and I’m tired and if I get started, before long I’ll just be keysmashing in fury. So let’s not and say we didn’t.)

The point is, the State of Oregon has basically said, “Welp. Guess you need to start watching for suspicious activity in your credit reports. Have fun!” But what we actually did, in this household, was freeze our reporting.

Mind you I didn’t even know that was a thing until this event. On the upside, the three credit reporting agencies seems to deal with “freezes” fairly regularly, as evidenced by the fact that all of their websites seem to lead with, “Are you here to freeze your credit reporting? Here’s a big friendly button.” It took me about forty minutes all told to get signed up at Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion… and that included some general puttering around trying to get a feel for things, not to mention some concern & annoyance over one of the services’ “security questions.

At any rate, theoretically it should be more difficult for identity thieves to use our names to ruin our credit by doing whatever-it-is they do with the information that the State of Oregon DMV so carelessly mishandled. Yay.