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Equifax's Data Breach By the Numbers: 146 Million Social Security Numbers, 99 Million Addresses, and More (theregister.co.uk)
Several months after the data breach was first reported, Equifax has published the details on the personal records and sensitive information stolen in the cybersecurity incident. The good news: the number of individuals affected by the network intrusion hasn't increased from the 146.6 million Equifax previously announced, but extra types of records accessed by the hackers have turned up in Mandiant's ongoing audit of the security breach," reports The Register. From the report: Late last week, the company gave the numbers in letters to the various U.S. congressional committees investigating the network infiltration, and on Monday, it submitted a letter to the SEC, corporate America's financial watchdog. As well as the -- take a breath -- 146.6 million names, 146.6 million dates of birth, 145.5 million social security numbers, 99 million address information and 209,000 payment cards (number and expiry date) exposed, the company said there were also 38,000 American drivers' licenses and 3,200 passport details lifted, too.
The further details emerged after Mandiant's investigators helped "standardize certain data elements for further analysis to determine the consumers whose personally identifiable information was stolen." The extra data elements, the company said, didn't involve any individuals not already known to be part of the super-hack, so no additional consumer notifications are required.
The further details emerged after Mandiant's investigators helped "standardize certain data elements for further analysis to determine the consumers whose personally identifiable information was stolen." The extra data elements, the company said, didn't involve any individuals not already known to be part of the super-hack, so no additional consumer notifications are required.
Remember when we used to have standards for things?
How many people from other countries got screwed by Equifax and to what degree? The stories reporting affected people seem to continually ignore the fact that there's more to the planet than the US and companies like Equifax have no qualms about screwing non-USians, too.
I have a very short short term memory. What happened to Equi...Oh look its a bird, its a plane...Oh look, the new season of Survivor is on.
It's a good thing all those executives went to prison so corporations will start taking security seriously.
Oh wait.
For Equifax to be in charge of my personal information.
Can anyone elaborate as to why they were put in charge, and what recourse do I have to punish this company for mishandling my information?
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Why do financial institutions seem to insist that Social Security numvers are a secret code? The government should just publish ALL of the SSNs in a digest. It's not supposed to be secret information, but credit agencies for some reason think it's a secret code, and knowing it means somebody should be able to be granted instant credit at the cash register of a department store.
If it makes it more expensive for credit agencies to do actual background checks before extending credit they can suck air.
If 10% of the population went on record and disclosed their SSNs publicly it would shut down the SSN as a 'secret code.' It's time for it to happen.
Equifax should be shut down for gross malfeasance, its charter dissolved, and its executives and board of directors held without bail on criminal charges.
I keep saying, the following penalty scheme imposed on companies will clean up data breaches right quick:
$1 per name, email, physical address
$2 per phone number
$3 per credit card number
$4 per SSN
And multiply for combinations thereof. You'll see how fast companies move to secure their data.
I got a letter from the IRS that my SSN is being used by someone else to obtain employment. Again. Thanks, Equifax!
After we collect a few heads.
That's the names, dates of birth, and tax ID numbers of roughly 45% of the entire United States (population ~326 million). Subtract children who don't have credit yet (~74 million), that's roughly 58% of US adults.
If "payment card" means credit card, that's 20% of all them in the US (1,041 million). Often you only need the number and expiration date to charge something to the card.
Those addresses are for roughly 30% of the population (if an address was attached to one name), or more (if an address was attached to multiple names [ie: people living together]).
While you won't find this info out there as it's been pretty hushed, but walmart.com took down their CC application site for over a week after a load of stolen IDs were used to apply for CC's there. There is some indication that the data came from this breach.
Their primary business is making sure adverse credit information follows people around, while making the assumption that the adverse reports are actually about the named person. Even while they know damned well that their own negligence has enabled ID fraud on a massive scale.
The number of top executives who went to jail : 0
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
how is this legal? who do we have to execute to fix this shit? the credit agency business shouldn't even be legal in the first place. lenders should have to make their own judgement.
Number of those responsible for the breach raped in jail : 0
ShanghaiBill opined:
Non-violent offenders do not belong in prison.
Prompting a courageous Anonymous Coward to respond:
Is that a reference to the poor persecuted drug users? At least when they are locked up, they are not pouring money into the Mexican drug cartels' pockets.
You really, really need to read Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sam Quinones' book Dreamland: The True Story of America's Opioid Epidemic. It's essentially the story of how Perdue Pharmaceuticals created the opioid epidemic in the USA by misrepresenting to the FDA, Congress, and doctors across the country how "harmless" prescribing powerful opiod narcotics was, even for chronic pain.
Based strictly on Perdue's bullshit, doctors - especially high school and college sports medicine doctors - prescribed amounts of Perdue's high-purity hydocodone medication high enough to guarantee addiction in athletes, housewives, and victims of trauma (auto accidents, falls, etc.) over long periods of time. When schools and insurance companies cut them off from those pharmaceutical sources, they turned in droves to Mexican brown heroin - which a whole new coop-style drug cartel operating out of the region around Xalisco supplied, using a fleet of drivers and a central dispatcher in each city they expanded into to bring the heroin to their customers with virtually zero risk of being caught making a deal.
Those drug addicts whose lives you so casually dismiss were almost all created by Perdue's lies, and multi-billion-dollar, direct-to-physicians marketing campaign. They're junkies, yes. But most of them are victims of deliberate pharmaceutical industry malfeasance, not deliberate actors.
Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with Sam Quinones, nor do I have any affiliate relationship with Amazon. If you buy his book via the above link, I get exactly zero dollars - or any other consideration - from the sale. (And you can get it from any other major bookseller, if you prefer not to make Jeff Bezos any richer, btw.) I simply believe it's essential reading for anyone who's interested in how the hell this country found itself in this mess to begin with, and who's responsible for getting us here ...
Check out my novel.
When I apply for a credit card, I want to be able to tell the credit card company, "You may send information about to me to any credit reporting agency except Equifax. You may not send information about me to Equifax."
That would help protect me from my data getting stolen from Equifax servers.
Also: If we could do that, and if enough people did it, then Equifax would have much less data about people to sell, which would hurt their business. Then they'd either straighten out, or go out of business. And their going out of business would be a warning to other credit reporting agencies to keep their data secure.
Maybe a law can be passed, which would let people restrict which credit reporting agencies get their data.
I don't worry about this because I run APK's hosts file engine. It is the ultimate security application or so he tells me. It does more than any other solution available. He even has small snippets of text that lack context from registered slashdot users to prove it.