Undeterred by the fact that noone has responded to my last post,
I offer the following update to the Equifax breach to further
illustrate my point. As many companies have found out, you don't
find out what you've got till it's gone.....a further reason for
data minimization and short retention periods.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/13/equifax_security_breach_bad/
Equifax hack worse than previously thought: Biz kissed
goodbye to card expiry dates, tax IDs etc
Pwned credit-score biz quietly admits more info lost
By Iain Thomson in San Francisco 13 Feb 2018 at 02:13
Last year, Equifax admitted
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/07/143m_american_equifax_customers_exposed/
hackers stole sensitive personal records on 145 million
Americans and hundreds of thousands in the UK
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/10/equifax_uk_records_update/
and Canada.
The outfit already said cyber-crooks "primarily" took names,
social security numbers, birth dates, home addresses,
credit-score dispute forms, and, in some instances, credit
card numbers and driver license numbers. Now the
credit-checking giant reckons the intruders snatched even more
information from its databases.
According to documents provided by Equifax to the US Senate
Banking Committee,
and revealed this month by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA),
https://apnews.com/2a51e3e5f9a945978df4ad96246b8ecc
the attackers also grabbed taxpayer identification numbers,
phone numbers, email addresses, and credit card expiry dates
belonging to some Equifax customers.
Like social security numbers, taxpayer ID numbers are useful
for fraudsters seeking to steal people's identities or their
tax rebates, and the expiry dates are similarly useful for
online crooks when linked with credit card numbers and other
personal information.
Contradictory
"As your company continues to issue incomplete, confusing and
contradictory statements and hide information from Congress
and the public, it is clear that five months after the breach
was publicly announced, Equifax has yet to answer this simple
question in full: what was the precise extent of the breach?"
Warren fumed in a missive late last week.
https://www.warren.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=2317
Equifax spokeswoman Meredith Griffanti stressed to The
Register today that the extra information snatched by hackers,
as revealed by Senator Warren, belonged to "some" Equifax
customers. In other words, not everyone had their phone
numbers, email addresses, and so on, slurped by crooks just
some. How much is some? Equifax isn't saying, hence Warren's
(and everyone else's) growing frustration.
The senator is a cosponsor of the proposed Data Breach
Prevention and Compensation Act,
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/10/credit_reporting_agencies_fines/
which, if passed, would impose computer security regulations
on credit reporting agencies, with mandatory fines that would
have led to Equifax coughing up $1.5bn for its IT blunder.
Some regulation or punishment is obviously needed.
No senior Equifax executives were fired over the attack
instead the CEO, CSO and CIO were all allowed to retire with
multi-million dollar golden parachutes. The US government's
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau promised a full
investigation into the Equifax affair, and then gave up. On
February 7, an open letter [PDF]
https://www.schatz.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CFPB%20Equifax%20Letter%202-7-18.pdf
from 32 senators to the bureau asked why the probe was
dropped, and the gang has yet to receive a response. ®