The Equifax Fraud Case

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Equifax commonly known as EFX is one of the three biggest consumer retail credit reporting companies in the world, the remaining two being Experian and Transunion, commonly known as the “Big Three”. Equifax was established in 1890, with its headquarters based in Atlanta, Georgia. The annual revenue income being about 3.14 billion US dollars and about 9500 employees working globally. Aside from offering credit and demographic related data, services to business, Equifax also sells credit monitoring and fraud-prevention services directly to consumers. (Haselton, T. 2017, September 8).
However, the Equifax company has been in news lately mainly of the major cybersecurity breach incident, which lead to exposure of about 143 billion members personal data to be exposed to hackers including their full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers. Equifax also confirmed at least 209,000 consumers credit card credentials were taken in the attack. (Haselton, T. 2017, September 8). …show more content…
Department of Homeland Security, they identified and discovered a flaw in a tool known as the “apache struts”, by which many large businesses and government organizations including Equifax use it to support its online dispute portal or any log issues with their credit reports. The flaw allowed hackers to take control of the Equifax website. The vulnerability is caused by how Apache Struts deserializes untrusted data. An attacker can use the vulnerability to find the credentials, connect to the database server, and extract all data or even delete the data.( Brewster, T.F. 2017, September

Equifax Fraud Case

database jeopardized the safety of approximately 143 million Equifax customers given that the hackers copied personal information about the clients. The breach known to be biggest hacking in the United States, took place for months while the company tried to upgrade their security system. The company’s management indicated that the data breach had occurred earlier in May until July 30 before they took action (Symanovich, 2017). Equifax admitted that they were aware that their system was vulnerable…

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