Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

Kick Back and Relax in the Cheers! Forum. Thoughts on life or want advice or thoughts from other pca members. Or just plain "chill". Originator of da Babe threads.
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wvjohn
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Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/ ... o_equifax/

long, with links.

tl;dr

1) get free annual copies of your credit report now.

2) freeze your credit.

3) FYI - if you've ever gotten credit, you are probably haxtored. If you use Equifax to check if you have been haxored, you have to sign a waiver agreeing to arbitration for any damages. If you agree you do get a years worth of credit monitoring, but not sure how good that is. I was haxored in the OPM breach and got the credit monitoring, but mostly it told me stuff that was non credit related.
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wvjohn
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

Post by wvjohn »

I decided to go ahead and freeze for the time being. Of course, credit bureaus are over whelmed.

results so far
experian - no problem took 3 mins and cost $5.00 +-
Equifax - unable to process due to high vo9lume
Transunion - unable to process due to high vol caused by equifax breach

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
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wvjohn
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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...
Last edited by wvjohn on Thu Sep 14, 2017 8:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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wvjohn
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

Post by wvjohn »

wvjohn wrote:I decided to go ahead and freeze for the time being. Of course, credit bureaus are over whelmed.

results so far
experian - no problem took 3 mins and cost $5.00 +-
Equifax - unable to process due to high vo9lume
Transunion - unable to process due to high vol caused by equifax breach

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

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psypher
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

Post by psypher »

yea, I have all locked except for Transunion. Haven't been able to reach them for the past 2 days.
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FlyingPenguin
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Yeah I guess I should put some time aside to do this next week. Should probably have done it a while back.
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wvjohn
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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I got thru to trans union - they make you create an account - then they said no can do over net and gave a phone#. Before I basically got a 404. Krebs also list Innovus as one to freeze - https://www.innovis.com/personal/securityFreeze
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psypher
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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Yes, I just found out there is a 4th credit bureau this week. Thankfully they don't charge for the credit freeze.
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Genom
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

Post by Genom »

Thanks for the reminder. Got all done except for equifax
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psypher
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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I finally got Transunion done online.
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normalicy
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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I got all but equifax due to them saying that they were down. They want me to mail my request in....
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wvjohn
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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finally done. Transunion was a PIA. Web no worky, 3rd time on the phone after disconnects got someone in a call center in Outer Mumbai with one of the worst VOIP connections I've ever heard. 10 mins of please repeat - can you hear me now??? Oh well, it's done.
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wvjohn
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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Equifax was also haxored in March.....all we need now is to learn they were using Yahoo mail.....

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... -disclosed

Equifax Inc. learned about a major breach of its computer systems in March -- almost five months before the date it has publicly disclosed, according to three people familiar with the situation.

In a statement, the company said the March breach was not related to the hack that exposed the personal and financial data on 143 million U.S. consumers, but one of the people said the breaches involve the same intruders. Either way, the revelation that the 118-year-old credit-reporting agency suffered two major incidents in the span of a few months adds to a mounting crisis at the company, which is the subject of multiple investigations and announced the retirement of two of its top security executives on Friday.

Equifax hired the security firm Mandiant on both occasions and may have believed it had the initial breach under control, only to have to bring the investigators back when it detected suspicious activity again on July 29, two of the people said.

Equifax’s hiring of Mandiant the first time was unrelated to the July 29 incident, the company spokesperson said. Vitor De Souza, senior vice president for global marketing at FireEye Inc., Mandiant’s parent company, declined to comment.

The revelation of a March breach will complicate the company’s efforts to explain a series of unusual stock sales by Equifax executives. If it’s shown that those executives did so with the knowledge that either or both breaches could damage the company, they could be vulnerable to charges of insider trading. The U.S. Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the stock sales, according to people familiar with the probe.

Equifax has said the executives had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred when the transactions were made.

New questions about Equifax’s timeline are also likely to become central to the crush of lawsuits being filed against the Atlanta-based company. Investigators and consumers alike want to know how a trusted custodian of so many Americans’ private data could let hackers gain access to the most important details of financial identity, including social security and driver’s license numbers, and steal credit card numbers.

In public statements since disclosing the intrusion on Sept. 7, Equifax said it became aware of the breach only after the data taken by the hackers had been gone for months. The company said it discovered the incident on July 29 and “acted immediately to stop the intrusion and conduct a forensic review.” Equifax hired Mandiant to help with the probe on Aug. 2, and said the investigators eventually learned that the hackers had accessed the data in mid-May.

There’s no evidence that the publicly disclosed chronology is inaccurate, but it leaves out a set of key events that began earlier this spring, the people familiar with the probe said.

In early March, they said, Equifax began notifying a small number of outsiders and banking customers that it had suffered a breach and was bringing in a security firm to help investigate. The company’s outside counsel, Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding, first engaged Mandiant at about that time. While it’s not clear how long the Mandiant and Equifax security teams conducted that probe, one person said there are indications it began to wrap up in May. Equifax has yet to disclose that March breach to the public.

One possible explanation, according to several veteran security experts consulted by Bloomberg, is that the investigation didn’t uncover evidence that data was accessed. Most data breach disclosure laws kick in only once there’s evidence that sensitive personal identifying information like social security numbers and birth dates have been taken. The Equifax spokesperson said the company complied fully with all consumer notification requirements related to the March incident.

Even so, the revelation of an earlier breach will likely raise questions for the company’s beleaguered executives over whether that investigation was sufficiently thorough or if it was closed too soon. For example, Equifax has said that the hackers entered the company’s computer banks the second time through a flaw in the company’s web software that was known in March but not patched until the later activity was detected in July.

Security experts say victim companies have wide leeway about how deep an investigation they want outside investigators to do. Some clients will limit the breadth of access or the time outside investigators can spend on site. Others want a full assessment that encompasses their entire computer network and could include the identification of existing security vulnerabilities. Cost is often a consideration, but the victim company might also believe a breach’s scope is limited.


It’s the stock sales by several executives that are likely to get the most scrutiny in light of the new timeline. On Aug. 1 and Aug. 2, regulatory filings show that three senior Equifax executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million, with none of the filings listing the transactions as being part of scheduled 10b5-1 trading plans. Equifax’s Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374; Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099; and Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock.

Equifax has said the executives “had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time,” and the company spokesperson declined to make them available for comment.

Under the company’s publicly disclosed timeline, there were fewer than a handful of days between the stock sales and the date Equifax said the breach was discovered. Under the new timeline, those sales come several months after the March breach but before the public had any knowledge of major security issues at one of the country’s three big credit-reporting agencies.

The new timeline is also likely to focus scrutiny on an earlier sale by Gamble of 14,000 shares on May 23. According to a regulatory filing, which didn’t indicate that the sale was part of a scheduled trading plan, the value of that transaction was $1.91 million, more than twice the size of his Aug. 1 disposal of 6,500 shares for $946,374.

If the two hacks are unrelated it could be that different hacking teams had different goals. One clue has emerged that suggests one goal of the attackers was to use Equifax as a way into the computers of major banks, according to a fourth person familiar with the matter.

This person said a large Canadian bank has determined that hackers claiming to sell celebrity profiles from Equifax on the dark web -- information that appears to be fraudulent, or recycled from other breaches -- did in fact steal the username and password for an application programming interface, or API, linking the bank’s back-end servers to Equifax.

According to the person and a Sept. 14 internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg, the gateway linked a test and development site used by the bank’s wealth management division to Equifax, allowing the two entities to share information digitally.

The discovery suggests that the attackers may have been trying to piggyback off of Equifax’s connections to large banks and other financial institutions as a backdoor way to hack those entities and gain access to sensitive partner systems. The company spokesperson said Equifax is “working diligently with our bank partners to assess and mitigate any impact to their operations.”
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wvjohn
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Re: Suggestions for personal action on the equifax breach

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It is reported that Wells Fargo now has a note on their customer login page directing customers to info about freezing their credit reports. /s Apparently Wells Fargo does not want anyone other company opening unauthorized accounts for the customers since it would cut into the unauthorized accounts they open /s
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