On July 29th Equifax, a consumer credit reporting agency in the United States identified that its servers suffered a massive data breach in which hackers stole a massive trove of data belonging to American citizens including names, date of birth, drivers license numbers, credit card data, and addresses.
Equifax only revealed the incident to its customers on September 9th, 2017. Initially, the numbers of the affected customers provided by the company were 143 million Americans, which was over 40% of the entire population of the United States. However, now, it has been revealed that the breach was worse than originally thought – What’s worse is that the whole time the company did not reveal it to the affected customers.
According to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a letter has been sent by committee member Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Paulino Do Rego Barros, the Interim Chief Executive Officer at Equifax Inc. in which it was stated that after conducting 5 months of investigation she identified that other than the data detailed by the company on last year, hackers also accessed email addresses, license state, date of issue of those licenses and tax identification numbers (TINs).
In a conversation with CNNMoney, Equifax spokesperson Meredith Griffanti said that “the original list of vulnerable personal information was never intended to represent the full list of potentiality exposed information.”
Remember, the Equifax breach is not limited the customers in the United States, in fact, British and Canadian residents also had their personal data stolen.
Equifax Inc. is considered one of the three largest American credit agencies along with Experian and TransUnion, therefore, the recent update itself is an embarrassing moment for the company. Previously, right after the breach, Equifax website was found infected with a malware while the company blamed the breach on a flaw in Apache Struts framework.
Equifax is currently facing a lawsuit filed by customers citing that the company failed to implement proper security measures to protect their data.
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