If you look at the release dates of some of the code that is not vulnerable to this attack, it goes back to early June. To me, it looks like this was identified almost two months ago. The question then is: Was this suddenly announced once a planned mile-marker in IOS revisions had been met....or once they suspected the exploit was in the wild?
There's alot of half truths being bantered about. For the best info on credit, you need to go to Creditnet.
That being said, inquiries (or checks) on your credit fall into two distinct categories: hard and soft.
Hard inquiries are inquiries that are initiated per your attempt to aquire credit, usually applying for new credit, sometimes by requesting credit limit increases. These stay on your reports for two years and do indeed knock a few points off of your FICO score per inquiry. The FICO formula only pays attention to hard inquiries in the past six months...anything older is not factored into your FICO score, but a creditor may still use it for approval decisions. Multiple inquiries in a one month period while shopping for auto or mortgagee loans are treated by FICO as a single inquiry.
Soft inquiries are inquiries that can be created by viewing your own credit report, a current creditor doing an account review, employer checks and those nice unsolicited preapproval letters you get from credit card companies. These inquiries also stay on your report for two years, but they are ONLY viewed by you and have NO effect whatsoever on your credit score.
Just as Usenet has been superceded by the web as the preferred information delivery protocol, the web's place amongst protocols in bound to change and be more defined. I see this change as leading towards FreeNet. Of course http will still be the premier Internet protocol in use. However, as more and more of these intellectual property skirmishes appear, it will make sense to host anything "controversial" on FreeNet to avoid any restriction of information - which is what the Internet was designed for, but now has become a business zone. Check out FreeNet and help make it work. http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
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If you look at the release dates of some of the code that is not vulnerable to this attack, it goes back to early June. To me, it looks like this was identified almost two months ago. The question then is: Was this suddenly announced once a planned mile-marker in IOS revisions had been met....or once they suspected the exploit was in the wild?
That being said, inquiries (or checks) on your credit fall into two distinct categories: hard and soft.
Hard inquiries are inquiries that are initiated per your attempt to aquire credit, usually applying for new credit, sometimes by requesting credit limit increases. These stay on your reports for two years and do indeed knock a few points off of your FICO score per inquiry. The FICO formula only pays attention to hard inquiries in the past six months...anything older is not factored into your FICO score, but a creditor may still use it for approval decisions. Multiple inquiries in a one month period while shopping for auto or mortgagee loans are treated by FICO as a single inquiry.
Soft inquiries are inquiries that can be created by viewing your own credit report, a current creditor doing an account review, employer checks and those nice unsolicited preapproval letters you get from credit card companies. These inquiries also stay on your report for two years, but they are ONLY viewed by you and have NO effect whatsoever on your credit score.
Just as Usenet has been superceded by the web as the preferred information delivery protocol, the web's place amongst protocols in bound to change and be more defined. I see this change as leading towards FreeNet. Of course http will still be the premier Internet protocol in use. However, as more and more of these intellectual property skirmishes appear, it will make sense to host anything "controversial" on FreeNet to avoid any restriction of information - which is what the Internet was designed for, but now has become a business zone. Check out FreeNet and help make it work. http://freenet.sourceforge.net/