The Equifax Data Breach Surprise

September 16, 2017
Equifax Data Breach Surprise | iZOOlogic

Equifax Data Breach

Lately, a major consumer credit reporting company was attacked by hackers which resulted in a massive data breach.

The data breach affected those who had a credit history in the US, UK, and Canada. An estimated 143 million people were affected by the breach. Equifax recently announced the incident but the company thinks the hack happened at an earlier time between May and the end of July.

The issue came out this first week of September as it was announced by Equifax.

How did it happen?

The company database was hacked through vulnerability on its website, putting at risk by exposing information of millions of people within the US,

Equifax knew the hacking incident last 29th of July, based on a FAQ, however, it was only publicly announced it this 7th of September.

What information was at risk?

The hackers were able to acquire the following

  • Names
  • Social Security Numbers
  • Birth Dates
  • Home addresses
  • Driver’s License Information
  • Some Credit Card Numbers
  • A few dispute documents

To control the damages; people affected whose Credit Card Numbers and dispute documents got exposed will receive a postal email just to let them know that their information was compromised. Who knows? Maybe this information was already being sold to the black market or dark web as early as the information got stolen.

Find Out How You Got Affected

You should know by yourself if you have or have not taken a loan from a bank or credit card services which require your credit information through Equifax.

If you suspect that your credit score was being handled by the company, then I suggest that you try to check the steps that I will provide:

  1. Go to www.equifaxsecurity2017(.)com
  2. Check Potential Impact tab
  3. Fill in the required information
  4. Wait for the results whether you got hacked or not

Why and How has it become vulnerable?

It is believed that the breach has been accomplished by exploiting a vulnerability in an open-source server software Apache Struts.

These two expression language vulnerabilities were most likely used to hack the system:

  • CVE-2017-5638
  • CVE-2017-9085

It is said that the first vulnerability above was most likely to cause the exploitation by getting the hacker to send a specific HTTP request with special syntax. In one scenario an OGNL expression. With that, the Equifax Struts application would receive this request, and deceive it into executing administrative operating system commands.

What to do in the aftermath?

As a business, you ought to do everything you could to control the damage already done by cybercriminals. With sensitive information breach such as this incident, companies should always find ways to monitor brand abuse on the surface web level, and more likely should consider activities such as dark web monitoring to track down and secure information which has been “leaked”.

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