For its part, Equifax is improving its approach relatively quickly. The company tells Ars Technica that it's moving to a randomized PIN generation system within a day of this writing (no later than September 12th), and that you can always change your existing PIN. We've asked the company for more details as well. However, it's safe to say that the security flaw is more than a little embarrassing for Equifax. Right now, the company is scrambling to limit the damage to 143 million Americans -- the last thing it needs is to create another opportunity for identity theft.

OMG, Equifax security freeze PINs are worse than I thought. If you froze your credit today 2:15pm ET for example, you'd get PIN 0908171415. — Tony Webster (@webster) September 9, 2017