The penalties in terms of financial and criminal prosecution are not severe enough for businesses to secure the data.
While they made millions in bonuses and charged YOU for YOUR data, they neglected securing the data.
We are a nation of laws, not a nation of “Whatever-Nutjob-Blogger-Karl-Denninger-Thinks-Is-Appropriate”.
This country’s corruption has gone way past handcuffs. It’s going to take rope and bullets to return the rule of law and save this republic.
Calling all reporters to visit with Martha Stewart and Martin Shkreli.
Bet there are some pithy quotes and parallels that could be extracted.
But, alas....lap-dog media will let this one pass.
I foresee the mother of all lawsuits.
All brought to you by corporate lobbyists and their payoffs to congress.
Yes but the price those foreign companies gave to create and maintain the software was such that major bonuses could be awarded to the executive staff.
You try so hard to protect your personal data, then Equifax ‘gives away’ the crown jewels. If you have a credit card, mortgage, car loan, etc. It is now out there. NOW WHAT?
This “breach” points the finger at a huge problem. Using the SSN as the universal personal identifier is collossally stupid! It was issued as the account number for a government retirement account. Nothing more. Because politicians cannot be trusted, it was used for everything else, and now it is an index to the universal citizen identification file.
Nothing can be more grossly stupid than this. No one, except me, is even talking about the scope of the problem.
One number gives access to ALL information. Everything.
Your retirement account number is the index to your record in a non-governmental agency, the “credit bureau”. Participation in this is not optional. You are in there.
Geez...how about starting out with explaining what Equifax is and what they’ve done wrong instead of starting a rant from inside some personal bubble...reads like a bunch of gibberish to me.
Better than "Where are the damned handcuff keys??"
Great post, thank you.
This is a really big deal. It will also be the convenient excuse for practically anything that happens now.
I wrote a long page of comments and then realized that I was just writing another version of the article itself. One could go on and on about this.
So snippets...
I do think the credit unions now want EVERYONE to PAY THEM for credit monitoring. (And a government program to make payments to them for “the poor and vulnerable” will be needed too!)
What better way to get paid than to run their own credit monitoring service to make sure everyone is behaving, including them? “I’m kicking my ass!” (movie quote). CREDIT UNIONS and especially now Equifax HAVE CONSPIRED TO CREATE A MARKET FOR THEIR OWN CREDIT MONITORING SERVICES. Free at first, mandatory later.
Their requirement for agreeing to arbitration if you sign for the monitoring service is quite a concern also.
No source of loans or credit or even use of credit scores for rating insurance (etc) should use anything provided by Equifax.
Americans should also refuse to have anything to do with reports from ANY company (the other two) that does not assure us (with proof) that ALL their records are encrypted and better protected.
Equifax should now go out of business forever due to lack of public trust. And maybe they should be destroyed officially the same way that any criminal conspiracy is taken apart by authorities.
(And all the other stuff in the article too!)
Good riddance Equifax. I hope this snowballs into a movement so that things actually improve in these USA regarding credit bureaus.
Class action complaint launched in Chicago federal court vs Equifax over data breach
by Scott Holland | Sep. 8, 2017
One day after it announced a data breach potentially affecting 143 million Americans, Equifax found itself on the other end of a federal class action complaint in Chicago.
On Sept. 8, Chicago resident Sean Neilan filed a complaint against Atlanta-based Equifax LLC, as a result of the July 29 discovery of unauthorized access to the credit reporting agency’s databases. The company announced the vulnerability Sept. 7, saying criminals accessed files from mid-May through the end of July, including names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses and driver license numbers of millions of people.
The lawsuit is roughly similar to a class action lawsuit filed in Oregon federal court over the data breach on Sept. 7, the same day Equifax revealed the breach.
Neilan said he used a tool on the company’s website to determine the breach affected him and then filed the complaint because he “suffered from the deprivation of the value of his private information and will incur future costs and expenditures of time to protect himself from identity theft.”
According to the complaint, Equifax has information on more than 800 million people worldwide, and Neilan suggested high-profile data breaches involving Anthem, Yahoo and its competitor Experian means Equifax should have known it was a prime target for hackers.
“In fact, it makes many millions of dollars in profits convincing Americans to buy their credit protection and identity theft monitoring services to guard against such breaches and the damages they cause,” the complaint stated. “Despite this, Equifax failed to take adequate steps to secure its systems.”
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