Equifax Data Breach: Over a Hundred Million People have had Sensitive Information Stolen

DocSwag · September 8, 2017

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/equifax-website-hack-exposes-data-for-143-million-us-consumers/

This post courtesy of @Dylanc1500

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Equifax, a provider of consumer credit reports, said it experienced a data breach affecting as many as 143 million US people after criminals exploited a vulnerability on its website. The US population is about 324 million people, so that's about 44 percent of its population.

The data exposed in the hack includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers. The hackers also accessed credit card numbers for 209,000 US consumers and dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 US people. Limited personal information for an unknown number of Canadian and UK residents was also exposed. Equifax—which also provides credit monitoring services for people whose personal information is exposed—said the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July. Equifax officials discovered the hack on July 29.

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People who want to know if their data was exposed can enter their last name and the last six digits of their Social Security number on this page. Unfortunately, the responses to those queries are extremely opaque. Another major shortcoming: the site is hosted on a third-party domain that's protected by a TLS certificate that returns wasn't being properly checked for revocation at the time this post was being written. On Thursday, Equifax offered to provide free credit monitoring for people affected by the latest breach.

Basically, Equifax was hacked, and had sensitive information including social security numbers, birth dates, etc. stolen from 143 million people. This comprises nearly half of the US population. This hack is particularly bad because this information could all potentially be used for credit card fraud and whatnot. And the huge amount of people that were hacked makes this particularly deadly.