To help potential victims, OPM is offering credit and identity monitoring, identity-theft insurance and identity-restoration services for three years through ID Experts, a private company.
In its statement, OPM announced several steps it has taken and will take to "protect" those impacted by the breach, including providing identity theft insurance; identity monitoring for minor children; credit and fraud monitoring; and "full service identity restoration support and victim recovery assistance".
It also offered them a free 12-month identity monitoring service.
The company has engaged with the identity monitoring firm, Kroll, to provide identity theft protection for a year as mandated by law.
The study points out few of the 22 million victims from the 2015 Office of Personnel Management used the free package of credit and identity monitoring, insurance, and identity restoration services offered.
After introducing a free identity monitoring tool for its users late last year, Credit Karma is widening the scope of its fraud-fighting scans to include data from the dark web.
"One consumer group representative noted that identity monitoring services require consumers to provide additional personal information to enroll which also could be compromised if the service provider's information were breached," the GAO report states.
In its statement, Ticketmaster told customers that affected accounts had been contacted and were offered a free 12-month identity monitoring service as a consolation as soon as the company became aware of the breach.
The US startup launched a monitoring tool six months ago — in part a response to the many large data breaches that we have seen hit the Equifaxes of the world in recent times — and it will be expanding that to do more with identity monitoring.
In addition to identity monitoring and finding and organizing connections, the site allows members to house email and social networking accounts on one site and one dashboard to help streamline online management.
People can best defend against cyber criminals by staying educated, keeping abreast of their credit reports, being cognizant of what they share online, and using an identity monitoring service that can keep an eye on their identity in obscure places online and offline.
