Equifax security breach could affect as many as 143 million US consumers

Equifax, one of the big suppliers of credit information and credit services, said Thursday that a security breach this summer may have affected as many as 143 million people in the United States.

Let’s do the math on that pretty quickly. There are, according to recent estimates, about 325 million people in the country. So that means that about 44 percent, or nearly half of United States residents. In other words, read on, because this affects you.

“Criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files,” Equifax said in a statement.

The breach, discovered July 29, exposed names, birthdates, social security numbers, addresses, and drivers license numbers, as well as 209,000 credit-card numbers and “certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers.

Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

Equifax’s very bread and butter is protecting exactly this information. The company completed its private investigation into the breach, and NBC News said that the FBI is actively investigating the incident with cooperation from Equifax.

CNBC notes that three Equifax execs, including the company’s Chief Financial Officer John Gamble Jr., as well as the company’s workforce solutions president and information solutions president, sold $2 million in shares just days after the breach was discovered. It’s hard not to look at that as an indicator that they knew very early how bad this breach was and took measures to protect themselves.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/09/08/equifax-security-breach/