Data leaks are quite common these days but still, they are as scary and harmful as before. A recent incident just showed us that we are not still not equipped enough to fight this evil. Credit reporting service Equifax announced on Thursday that a massive data breach on their platform could involve around 143 million consumers' private data. This is worse than you can imagine.
Many of the users' data that have been leaked from Equifax includes people's social security numbers, birth dates, addresses and even driver's license numbers. And if that wasn't bad enough, around 209,000 people's credit card information has been leaked too. The breach also included dispute documents with personally identifying information from 182,000 consumers, reported TechCrunch.
Equifax reported that they had noticed the breach on July 29 and took steps to counter it. The company then hired a cyber security firm to determine the extent of the damage. The company has also involved law enforcement, but it's not clear at this point how the intruders entered the system or exactly what they took.
Equifax held on the news for one month and announced it only on Thursday and even after a month of preparation worried consumers didn't have it easy.
Equifax did develop a site, www.equifaxsecurity2017.com, dedicated for inquiries, however, when users on Friday rushed to the site, they couldn't find anything more than essentially an ad for Equifax's own credit monitoring service.
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As TechCrunch reported, one of the writers of the publication called Equifax several times to check if her information was safe or not. After waiting for a considerable amount of time, every time the call got disconnected.
Although the information that was leaked belonged mostly to the US residents, some UK and Canadian citizens were also hit. The company is currently working with the authorities of these countries.
