Equifax Was Warned (vice.com)

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard: Months before its catastrophic data breach, a security researcher warned Equifax that it was vulnerable to the kind of attack that later compromised the personal data of more than 145 million Americans, Motherboard has learned. Six months after the researcher first notified the company about the vulnerability, Equifax patched it -- but only after the massive breach that made headlines had already taken place, according to Equifax's own timeline. This revelation opens the possibility that more than one group of hackers broke into the company. And, more importantly, it raises new questions about Equifax's own security practices, and whether the company took the right precautions and heeded warnings of serious vulnerabilities before its disastrous hack. Late last year, a security researcher started looking into some of the servers and websites that Equifax had on the internet. In just a few hours, after scanning the company's public-facing infrastructure, the researcher couldn't believe what they had found. One particular website allowed them to access the personal data of every American, including social security numbers, full names, birthdates, and city and state of residence, the researcher told Motherboard.

Comments

Regardless of any warning

[Lucas123]

Equifax is a company that collects sensitive financial information without permission from consumers and shares it with financial services companies. It's cybersecurity should be the physical equivalent of Ft. Knox. This multi-billion company has no excuse for allowing such a flagrant breach of its data.

Re:Regardless of any warning

[atrimtab]

Except most of the harmed never signed any agreement that includes FORCED ARBITRATION in their relations with Equifax, because the harmed are NOT Equifax customers. That means that all effected US citizens who are not Equifax customers CAN sue directly or via class action.

The issue will be showing that you were damaged specifically by Equifax's negligence. They will likely defend themselves via all the reports of the similar losses of the same and similar personal data via other corporations also piss poor security practices.

It will be very hard for any specific individual or class to show losses specific to Equifax. Sure , you may be able to show identity theft and losses because of it, but was that specifically because of Equifax? Good luck proving that.

Equifax certainly does deserve the "Corporate Death Penalty." But there are many ways for them to avoid it, followed by a fresh coat of paint and likely a new name. Just watch....

Today there is no such thing as a responsible corporate citizen. There probably never was.

Re:Regardless of any warning

[AvitarX]

Yeah, but the only way to cripple Equafax would be to make it toxic to do business with them.

The real message would be class action against the banks that hand over the information to places with poorly vetted security.

Re:Linux in Action!

[omnichad]

Apache Struts had plenty of quality control. The bugs in question were patched LONG before any breach. The fact that it's open source is what enabled a third-party security company to discover and report the security vulnerability so quickly.

It's a double-edged sword, since not patching your systems means that vulnerabilities are published for all to see. But the patch was available.

Re:Linux in Action!

[MightyYar]

It doesn't matter what you use if you don't patch it.

This happens when IT departments get too big!

[ErichTheRed]

I've worked in big companies for a long time and I'm not surprised. The IT security people are usually in-house, but I wouldn't be shocked if they were offshore or totally outsourced. When the IT security team is contacted by a "researcher" telling them somehting's vulnerable, big IT departments will take forever to put anything into place. First the security team has to run it up the flagpole to their management, then their management has a meeting to decide what course of action to recommend to the server team. The server team (who also may be offshored or outsourced, which introduces more delays) will be told that they have a vulnerability to patch. Application owners affected will need to be contacted to determine when a good time to patch will be. Worse still, if it's a shared service like a service bus or core application component, you have to coordinate that among all the systems' users. Only then can a change management notice be raised, then discussed at the Change Approval Board meeting, then scheduled. At any point, this can also be delayed by the application owner saying they can't take the downtime.

I'm sure all the DevOps kids will say "dude, just put it in the cloud and CI/CD it...we release 20 times a day!" Legacy financial systems are a different animal. You might be able to release the web front-ends to a system like that 20 times a day, but big company IT's complexity and culture make it hard to apply this to the core.