Equifax Case Study

 Here are some steps that Equifax should have taken: The CEO should have made sure that the Apache software was updated when they notified the company of the new patch that would secure important consumer data. His position requires him to monitor all operations of the company and make sure everything is running smoothly and properly.  The CEO should not have placed all of the blame on one IT employee. Smith told the public that the employee did not install the patch when he/she should have. The public was not pleased with this answer, nor did they believe it.  Equifax should have informed authorities and the public as soon as they discovered the breach. Not wait 6 weeks and then decide to tell them. The company should have been transparent with their customers. The breach caused mistrust as it is.  Withholding something this important from the public hurts the relationship that Equifax has with its customers even more.  Equifax should have fired their CEO befor...

 Overall, reporters, public officials, and bloggers are blaming Equifax for the breach and are quite angry with the company. The Los Angeles Times published an article that stated, "Equifax basically left all our data out on the lawn for anyone to walk off with - the upshot of failing to encrypt the databases that store some of the most sensitive details of our lives" (Lazarus, 2020). The breach wouldn't have happened if Equifax had installed the update and kept its guard up. The attackers used encryptions to go unnoticed while accessing the data but Equifax never thought to encrypt the data in order to protect customer's sensitive information. The author suggests that other companies such as,  Google and Amazon, are not encrypting their data either and they should be. Lawmakers should step in and force the companies to encrypt all customer records. There should be fixed penalties for any breach. I think that this might be a good idea even though it will be costly for...

  On September 7, 2017 Equifax announced the cybersecurity incident to the public in the form of a press release. The company stated that the information that was breached included names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver's license numbers. They revealed that they discovered the breach on July 29, 2017 and acted to immediately stop the intrusion. The company partnered with an independent cybersecurity firm to determine how many people were impacted and how much data was breached. Also, they reported the crime and are working with the authorities to determine who is behind the attack and how it happened. Equifax made the website, www.equifaxsecurity2017.com, so that customers could determine whether their information was impacted as well as signing up for free credit monitoring and identity theft protection. The chairman and CEO, Richard Smith, apologized to the consumers for the breach. He stated, "We pride ourselves on being a leader in managing ...

Equifax was founded in 1899 in Atlanta, Georgia by Cator and Guy Woolford. The company's original name was the Retail Credit Company. Equifax became a publicly owned company in 1965. Today, Equifax operates globally with branches in the UK, Europe, South Africa, and 21 other countries. The company's main goal is to power the world with knowledge. They always have their customer's best interests at heart and focus all of their efforts on them. They offer financial services and advice to consumers in all stages of life. Whether they are entering college, buying their first home, managing a business, or preparing for retirement. The company claims that they are the credit experts. Their purpose is "to help people live their financial best".  Equifax has a negative past. During the company's early years, they collected tons of data on consumers and turned the information over to banks and insurance companies. The data included marital troubles, rumors, people'...

 In May 2017, the credit monitoring firm Equifax was hacked and 143 million individual's personal information was exposed. The hackers gained access to millions of social security numbers and many people are at serious risk of identify theft. This is the worst corporate data breach in history. Equifax says it knew about the mega breach at the end of July and took six weeks before it notified the public. Equifax set up an additional website to address questions and offer free credit monitoring, a breach response page, but that page had bugs and issues as well. Also, Equifax tweeted a phishing link four separate times instead of the correct response page link. The public was not pleased that Equifax knew about the breach but did not immediately report it.  Upon further investigation of Equifax's system, the Apache Struts web-application software, it was discovered that the vulnerability of the system was disclosed to the company in March and the company chose not to remedy the s...