Carl Tyler's Blog

1 - Hey! Me, too! Got the letter last week. Mmmm... I'm thinking class-action...

2 - Interesting thing: I'm an EX IBM'er also.
I enrolled in this service.. It's a negotiated down version that's specific to IBM. They normally provide you with copies of your credit report from all 3 agencies. The deal with IBM does not provide this.

Once you enroll, they need to "baseline" your credit - that means that they need to establish what lines of credit exist right now.
If your ID is stolen already, you're screwed.
It'll take 1-3 months from the date of enrolling before "Theftsmart" will start generating reports.

There is zero data in my account right now.. Lovely service, eh?

3 - I am an ex-IBM'er who also enrolled in the ID Theftsmart service. It took ID Theftsmart almost 6 weeks to get me up and going. So, the monitoring just started a few days ago - 6 months from the time IBM lost the data. And - you are right, dcg - you get absolutely no information, so you have no idea what happened during those 6 long months. And, given the lack of information, you just have to assume they are monitoring, and assume that if you receive no emails that your credit is okay. It's a bit unnerving to give a company all my personal information for essentially nothing back.

Isn't nice that IBM spent all that time and money to negotiate such a sweet deal for us.

4 - I know how everyone feels. I received the breach notification from IBM... and I never worked from IBM!! IBM got my data from a company it bought (Lotus) after I'd left. And IBM has decided to archive all former employee data forever. IBM's data breach has highlighted the fact that a consumer can do everything right to protect his/herself from ID theft, and still become a victim when a prior employer has a data breach. And we all have prior employers. I write a blog about all of this including my experiences dealing with the mess IBM created, and what I've learned:
<a href="http://ivebeenmugged.typepad.com">http://ivebeenmugged.typepad.com</a>
George