Clark Howard: What you need to know about the Capital One Hack

Jacksonville, FL — Capital One is apologizing after a hacker was able to get a hold of the personal information for more than 100 million Capital One credit applications.

The hacker exposed information such as credit scores, balances, and the social security numbers of about 140,000 customers, according to Capital One. The bank said it is notifying customers affected by the breach and will offer free credit monitoring and identity protection.

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Consumer Warrior Clark Howard says breaches happen all too often and people are starting to become numb to the idea of data breaches happening and that’s not the mentality to have.

You need to put defenses in place that would provide some level of protection for you from what are inevitable breaches that can happen so many different ways and places in your life.

Clark says whether someone is a customer with Capital One or not – they need to start taking action.

Because your turn is coming up, it's just when.

Clark says the first thing people need to do is set up a dashboard with Credit Karma or Credit Sesame to keep an eye on their credit and to get a sense of which direction their credit score is going. The second step will be to set up a credit freeze.

Credit freeze is the most effective weapon we have against an identity thief because it prevents an identity thief even who has all kinds of information on us from opening accounts as if they are us.

According to Clark, the barriers that surround our personal information is too weak. He says this means credit and banking industries will have to come up with new procedures to verify identities. He warned about a potential “creep out” factor that could involve voice patterns, facial scans, on top of fingerprints at ATMs.

LISTEN: Clark Howard's latest podcast.