Equifax data breach exposes information of at least 147.5 million people

On September 7, 2017, the credit scoring company Equifax announced that between  mid-May and July 2017 its database of consumer records had been hacked. Eventually, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission following demands from US senators, the company provided detailed statistics of what was exposed: name, date of birth, and social security number for more than 145.5 million Americans; and further details such as address, gender, phone number, and driver's licence number for some of them. About 860,000 people in the UK and more than 19,000 people in Canada were also affected. Equifax eventually blamed the breach on an unpatched vulnerability in the web application software Apache Struts and on a single employee who failed to identify and patch it on a specific portal.

https://www.cnet.com/news/equifaxs-data-breach-by-the-numbers-the-full-breakdown/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43033202

https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/2017/09/13/progress-update-consumers-4/

tags: Equifax, data breaches, security, credit scoring, SEC