Data Security Risk Management

If your private information has been compromised or exposed, there are steps you can take to protect yourself.

The first steps you can take as an individual to increase protection from potential harm from the potential breach are:

  • Change your passwords on all your email accounts, social media accounts, bank accounts and VISA and Debit cards
  • Install a two-factor authentication on your bank accounts for when you sign in to do online banking
  • Install a two-factor authentication for your CRA my account
  • You can use websites such as haveibeenpwned.com to see if your email address has been compromised and how

If your banking information, SIN, or contact information has been compromised or exposed, there are some other ways you can protect yourself:

You may want to periodically request a credit report. Whether or not your data has been involved in a breach, you can receive a report from each of the national credit bureaus listed below.

Over the 12 to 36 months following a privacy breach, you should remain vigilant about suspicious activity and check your credit reports, as well as your other account statements, periodically. You should immediately report any suspicious activity to credit bureaus.

You may also want to place a fraud alert on your credit report. A fraud alert tells creditors to contact you before they open any new credit accounts or change your existing accounts. This can help prevent an identity thief from opening additional accounts in your name.

You can place a “credit freeze” on your credit file. In this situation, in the event that the data loss resulted in a breach, no credit reports could be released without your approval. Should this be a step you’d like to take, please contact the national credit bureaus below for more information. Both bureaus charge a fee for this service. To contact the credit bureaus, you can call the numbers below, or you can visit their websites for further contact information:

We know this can have a big impact and feel unsettling. 

We want to acknowledge and affirm the distressing nature of data losses and privacy breaches. We know that violations of safety, transgressions against our autonomy, and invasions of privacy can be triggering. Please reach out to us at admin@salalsvsc.ca if you need more information or you can read more here; additional information is available on the Privacy Commissioner’s website at oipc.bc.ca.