美国有线新闻 CNN 美征信巨头出现安全漏洞 1.43亿客户信息或遭泄露（在线收听）

Financially speaking, your credit is your trustworthiness to pay back a loan, might be for a house or a car, or something you buy in a credit card.

One major company that keeps track of people's credit is Equifax. You don't sign up for Equifax and you can't get rid of it. The agency just collects credit information on hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Here's the bad news, Equifax has been hacked and that might have exposed a massive amount of personal information to people who should not have it.

This is so concerning that the U.S. government which doesn't usually comment on ongoing investigations has confirmed that it's gotten involved to try to find out what went wrong.

JOSE PAGLIERY, CNN INVESTIGATIVE CURNOW: Equifax, one of the three big credit monitoring companies, those companies that track all of your finances and everything you do, just announced that hackers have broken into the company's databases and stolen information on 143 million Americans. For perspective, that's more than half of American adults, and the thing is, you might be affected even if you don't use Equifax, because Equifax tracks everybody.

So, what happened exactly? Hackers, we're not sure who, stole names, birthdays, addresses, Social Security numbers and importantly, driver's license numbers. This is extremely sensitive information that can be used to steal your identity.

According to the company, they also got access to 209,000 people's credit card numbers. This is the kind of thing that hackers can try to sell on the black market and fraudsters can then steal your tax refund at the end of the year, open up a bank account in your name, or in a pretty worse case scenario, print out fake IDs, get in trouble and police will be looking for you, not the fraudster.

You might be affected by this, even if you've never heard of Equifax, because this company tracks everyone who's applied for a loan, a mortgage, or open up a bank account.

AZUZ: Lawsuits are expected over this. Equifax has been accused of not doing enough to protect people's information from potential hacks. The agency is offering free temporary credit monitoring to those who might have been affected. Experts say people should sign up for that to check their own credit reports and they consider freezing their credit, which can make it harder for someone else to use your name to open an account.