Talk about a nightmare.  It is being reported that criminals were able to hack into Equifax and make off with the credit information of 143 million Americans.  We are talking about names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses and even driver's license numbers.  If this data breach was an earthquake, we would be talking about a magnitude-10.0 on the identity theft scale.  We have never seen anything like this before, and to say that this will be "disastrous" for the credit industry would be a massive understatement.

What really disturbed me about this story is that this hack reportedly occurred between "mid-May and July of this year"…

Credit monitoring company Equifax has been hit by a high-tech heist that exposed the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information about 143 million Americans. Now the unwitting victims have to worry about the threat of having their identities stolen.

The Atlanta-based company, one of three major U.S. credit bureaus, said Thursday that "criminals" exploited a U.S. website application to access files between mid-May and July of this year.