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One Year After the Massive Equifax Data Breach, Pretty Much Nothing Has Changed (axios.com)
The Equifax data breach was supposed to change everything about cybersecurity regulation on Capitol Hill. A year ago, Equifax announced that 145.5 million U.S. adults had their social security numbers stolen in an easily preventable breach. If any data breach was going to be able to shock Washington into enacting sweeping privacy reforms, this should have been it. Axios: But that didn't happen: "The initial interest that was implied by congressional actions didn't pan out," said Michelle Richardson, director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). What was supposed to happen: After the first of several hearings involving Equifax, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, said it was "long past time" for federal standards for how companies like Equifax secure data.
Data security wasn't the only anticipated reform. Congress appeared poised to create a national breach notification law governing how and how quickly companies must notify anybody whose personal information is stolen in a breach. Currently, to the chagrin of national retailers, those laws vary state to state. Several investigations were supposed to penalize the credit bureau for lax cybersecurity, including failing to patch the vulnerability hackers exploited despite government warnings. What actually happened: The bills petered out. Mick Mulvaney took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November and halted the bureau's investigation.
Data security wasn't the only anticipated reform. Congress appeared poised to create a national breach notification law governing how and how quickly companies must notify anybody whose personal information is stolen in a breach. Currently, to the chagrin of national retailers, those laws vary state to state. Several investigations were supposed to penalize the credit bureau for lax cybersecurity, including failing to patch the vulnerability hackers exploited despite government warnings. What actually happened: The bills petered out. Mick Mulvaney took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November and halted the bureau's investigation.
He's got big hands, though. Really big, the biggest. Very nice, very big hands. So he'll fix the cyber problem. It really won't be that hard. We've got some great people working on that. Really great, the best.
There's no incentive, no motive.
Customers are helpless to do anything about it so they just shrug and move on.
Their shit is out there anyway, what with all the other goddam break-ins.
In the spirit of, "too big to fail," Equifax is too big for their breaches.
All your base are belong to us.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I've been mulling over the lack of an armageddon since the breech happened. I'm not a conspiracy theory kind of guy, but my personal conclusion is that it was done by a state actor, and that actor was China. My suspicion is they hoovered Equifax because the exploit made them vulnerable and in doing so it gave China access to a treasure trove of information not just on pretty much every American, but a specific subset: every American working for the U.S. government. Every CIA agent, every NSA agent, in addition to every head of industry, every computer chip researcher. Anyone who might be of interest. At first I thought it might have been theft for stealing medical insurance coverage, but not only did that not happen, but nothing happened. It was such a huge haul of information that no criminal org capable of stealing that amount of info is going to sit on it - they need/want to monetize it for their efforts, but a government who wanted it for different purposes could.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I see a lot of these comments, and when I read them I hear a Russian accent.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I'm pretty pissed off that Meuller is investigating Trump and not Equifax.
In no way whatsoever are these alternative actions. Mueller would not be the right person to investigate Equifax anyway, since he doesn't grok technology.
The Equifax fiasco is not hard to understand. Unqualified people were placed in positions of authority, they made stupid decisions, and there were no mechanisms for underlings with better understanding to raise alarms.
But there are deeper systemic problems. Only in America do we rely on critical information being both secret and widely known. Mere knowledge of someone's SSN, DOB, and address should not be enough to clean out their bank account nor establish credit in their name. No other country has this problem. Until we fix our financial system, data breaches and identity theft will continue to be major problems.
> In no way whatsoever are these alternative actions. ...
> Unqualified people were placed in positions of authority, they made stupid decisions, and there were no mechanisms for underlings with better understanding to raise alarms.
And the other situation is Equifax.
That's not true.
The Republicans are 25% owned by the anti-science religious nuts and the Democrats are 25% owned by the bleeding heart liberals, so they're at most 75% owned by big money corporations.
The last line of the summary says it all: "Mick Mulvaney took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in November and halted the bureau's investigation."
The current administration is not interested in consumer protection.
They are on the side of business, not consumers.