Picture this: you wake up one day and find that your identity has been stolen. You realize that someone has access to your personal information such as date of birth, address, your social security number, and driving license information.
You may have new lines of credits opened in your name and someone used your information for accessing healthcare service. Seems like a scary nightmare, right? 143 million USA customers affected when Equifax announced a massive security breach in May this year. Here’s what you need to know about the Equifax Data Breach:
Equifax is one of the USA’s largest credit bureaus. The data breach affected about half of the US population. The breach lasted from mid-May through July 2017 and the hackers accessed personal information such as social security number, addresses, birth dates, credit card numbers, and dispute documents.
A report published in the USA Today says that the organization failed to address a security flaw that was present in their web application. The hackers targeted that vulnerable window and got through all the cyber defences of the organisation.
Equifax used Apache Struts web-application software. In a statement issued by Apache Software Foundation, they mentioned that a bug appeared in Equifax’s software earlier in March 2017 but the company didn’t update their platform, leaving the doors open for the hackers to sneak in.
https://www.wired.com/story/equifax-breach-no-excuse/
As per Equifax, about 209,000 consumers lost their credit card information during that period.
The credit firm tried to provide a remedy by setting up https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com, a special website. All the users can log into that website and can check whether their information has been compromised or not.
You never know when your data can be compromised. Software can become vulnerable if you do not update them regularly and fix the security patches. Take a layered security approach, check for best policies, processes, and solutions that can best mitigate these security threats.
