Equifax Breach is Very Possibly the Worst Leak of Personal Info Ever (arstechnica.com)

The breach Equifax reported Thursday is very possibly is the most severe of all for a simple reason: the breath-taking amount of highly sensitive data it handed over to criminals. Dan Goodin of ArsTechnica writes: By providing full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers, it provided most of the information banks, insurance companies, and other businesses use to confirm consumers are who they claim to be. The theft, by criminals who exploited a security flaw on the Equifax website, opens the troubling prospect the data is now in the hands of hostile governments, criminal gangs, or both and will remain so indefinitely. Hacks hitting Yahoo and other sites, by contrast, may have breached more accounts, but the severity of the personal data was generally more limited. And in most cases the damage could be contained by changing a password or getting a new credit card number. What's more, the 143 million US people Equifax said were potentially affected accounts for roughly 44 percent of the population. When children and people without credit histories are removed, the proportion becomes even bigger. That means well more than half of all US residents who rely the most on bank loans and credit cards are now at a significantly higher risk of fraud and will remain so for years to come. Besides being used to take out loans in other people's names, the data could be abused by hostile governments to, say, tease out new information about people with security clearances, especially in light of the 2015 hack on the US Office of Personnel Management, which exposed highly sensitive data on 3.2 million federal employees, both current and retired. Meanwhile, if you accept Equifax's paltry "help" you forfeit the right to sue the company, it has said. In its policy, Equifax also states that it won't be helping its customers fix hack-related problems.

UPDATE (9/9/17): Equifax has now announced that "the arbitration clause and class action waiver included in the Equifax and TrustedID Premier terms of use does not apply to this cybersecurity incident."

Bloomberg reported on Friday that a class action seeking to represent 143 million consumers has been filed, and it alleges the company didn't spend enough on protecting data. The class-action -- filed by the firm Olsen Daines PC along with Geragos & Geragos, a celebrity law firm known for blockbuster class actions -- will seek as much as $70 billion in damages nationally.

Comments

Re:Hopefully this will be the end of equifax

[LeftCoastThinker]

1. Government is a necessary evil. Seeing as we had to save your sorry European asses when the German, and later Russian governments got out of control and murdered millions of people, that assertion has a lot of validity. In the US the government fears the people, which is also known as freedom, what you guys have over there is not even close. You exist at the pleasure of your governments.

2. I would be happy to debate Creationism vs. evolution any time. You believe in spontaneous generation, a theory disproved several hundred years ago (rain fell on the rocks, made rock soup, and the soup came alive and then turned into a dog). Furthermore, evolution has never been observed in a lab and is directly contradicted by every scientific experiment ever performed over the last 100 years (nearly all of which were designed to prove that evolution was possible). Evolution is also contradicted by the existence and characteristics of DNA, the blueprints used to fabricate all known life on the planet. OTOH, I believe in an extra-dimensional being that in our dimension exhibits the characteristics of God and who has been documented and observed by literally millions of people over the last 4000 years, but somehow I am the irrational one.

But yes, please continue to think yourself superior for believing in non-science for the express purpose of excluding an extra-dimensional being simply because you don't like the consequences of having a creator God who demands that you live like he tells you to (even though if everyone did live in that way, it would create utopia on earth, what with everyone loving each-other like they love themselves).