Now they have been hacked and 143 million Americans have their sensitive info exposed!
That is about half the US population!
This is the biggest breach in US history
Atlanta-based Equifax said in a statement that it discovered the breach on July 29. It said criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files that included names, Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.
Credit card numbers are floating around so this is bad.
On a scale from 1 to 10 this is a 10!
The FBI is on it.
Ironically they are all for hacking and the NSA has made some hacks that were targeted on on others but seriously backfired because they came back to the US (styxnet).
It is not a wild speculation anymore that the hack could have a US government origin.
Three days after the hack three top executives sold Equifax shares:
Three days after Equifax discovered the breach, three top Equifax executives, including Chief Financial Officer John Gamble and a president of a unit, sold Equifax shares or exercised options to dispose off stock worth about $1.8 million, regulatory filings show. It was not clear whether these transactions were part of a pre-arranged sales plan.
Hopefully this will motivate the FBI to encourage safe and unhackable systems; so far they have discovered zero day weaknesses in several systems without alerting the suppliers of the systems.
They have actively tried to exploit the weaknesses and even been annoyed when they could not hack a system -ike Apple phones.
More here
