A lot can change in a year. Not when you’re Equifax.
The credit rating giant, one of the largest in the world, was trusted with some of the most sensitive data used by banks and financiers to determine who can be lent money. But the company failed to patch a web server it knew was vulnerable for months, which let hackers crash the servers and steal data on 147 million consumers. Names, addresses, Social Security numbers and more — and millions more driver license and credit card numbers were stolen in the breach. Millions of British and Canadian nationals were also affected, sparking a global response to the breach.
It was “one of the most egregious examples of corporate malfeasance since Enron,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer at the time.
Yet, a year on from following the devastating hack that left the company reeling from a breach of almost every American adult, the company has faced little to no action or repercussions.
In the aftermath, the company’s response to the breach was chaotic, sending consumers scrambling to learn if they were affected but were instead led into a broken site that was vulnerable to hacking. And when consumers were looking for answers, Equifax’s own Twitter account sent concerned users to a site that easily could have been a phishing page had it not been for a good samaritan.
Yet, the company went unpunished. In the end, Equifax was in law as much a victim as the 147 million Americans.
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