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Consumers can check to see if they've potentially been impacted https://www.equifaxsecurity2017.com/potential-impact/ by submitting their last name and the last six digits of their social security number.

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Those affected will be given a date to enroll in free identity theft protection and credit file monitoring services.

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The breach occurred between mid-May and July, Equifax said. The company said it discovered the hack on July 29.

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"This is reason Number 10,000 to check your online bank statements and credit card statements on a regular basis, ideally weekly,"

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Signym
So, a recently-hacked site tell me to submit my name and six SSNs? How do I know the problem is fixed NOW??? Maybe that submission in and of itself is a risky thing to do? I'll wait for the letter, thank you.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:


It makes me wonder - the people who are glued to their devices without an apparent care in the world - what are they thinking?

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Originally posted by Wishimay:

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
It makes me wonder - the people who are glued to their devices without an apparent care in the world - what are they thinking?

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I get to ignore the planet and all the people on it for a while??

Unless it's the people you want to on social media crap, or it's actual work...which I hear tell some people do that.

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Originally posted by Wishimay:
I get to ignore the planet and all the people on it for a while??

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Originally posted by Wishimay:
I don't think ANY of the hacks are unintentional. Gov't has your data already, all they lack is your "permission" to control it.

With the data reporting companies going down, and the CEO's will soon be prosecuted for insider trading when they dumped their own stocks this morning...Who is left but Big Brother Blue Sun....

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

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Originally posted by Wishimay:
I don't think ANY of the hacks are unintentional. Gov't has your data already, all they lack is your "permission" to control it.

With the data reporting companies going down, and the CEO's will soon be prosecuted for insider trading when they dumped their own stocks this morning...Who is left but Big Brother Blue Sun.... WISHY

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the execs started dumping their stocks a month ago. JSF

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Equifax Hit With $70 Billion Lawsuit After Leaking 143 Million Social Security Numbers

One day after Equifax announced (more than one month after it itself had learned) that its systems had been hacked, resulting in up to 143 million social security numbers, names, addresses, driver’s license data, birth dates, some credit card numbers and pretty much all other critical personal data being leaked and currently for sale somewhere on the dark web, the company whose job is, ironically, to protect the credit and personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans has been hit with a monster class-action lawsuit seeking as much as $70 billion.

In retrospect, we find it surprising that it wasn't multi-trillion lawsuit in light of the galactic stupidity exhibited by a company whose server apparently had zero firewalls from the internet and where any hacker could get access to the most confidential information available. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs alleged Equifax was negligent in failing to protect consumer data, choosing to save money instead of spending on technical safeguards that could have stopped the attack, Bloomberg reports. Imagine how much angrier they would be if they found that instead of "saving" the money, the company used it instead to buy back its own stock (in this case from selling executives).

“In an attempt to increase profits, Equifax negligently failed to maintain adequate technological safeguards to protect Ms. McHill and Mr. Reinhard’s information from unauthorized access by hackers,” the complaint stated. “Equifax knew and should have known that failure to maintain adequate technological safeguards would eventually result in a massive data breach. Equifax could have and should have substantially increased the amount of money it spent to protect against cyber-attacks but chose not to.”

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Mary McHill and Brook Reinhard. Both reside in Oregon and had their personal information stored by Equifax. Tens of millions more will join the lawsuit shortly once they realize their data has similarly been hacked. Readers can find out if they have been affacted by the leak at the following site.

According to Bloomberg, the case was filed by the firm Olsen Daines PC along with Geragos & Geragos, a celebrity law firm known for blockbuster class actions. Ben Meiselas, an attorney for Geragos, said the class will seek as much as $70 billion in damages nationally.

Finally, as one social media commentator put it, "In retrospect it seems like a really dumb idea to give three random companies access to the entire financial records of every American."

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Originally posted by Wishimay:
I don't think ANY of the hacks are unintentional. Gov't has your data already, all they lack is your "permission" to control it.

With the data reporting companies going down, and the CEO's will soon be prosecuted for insider trading when they dumped their own stocks this morning...Who is left but Big Brother Blue Sun....

I dunno. Maybe for the majority of people Gov't regulating that info might not be sucha bad things, either. I mean, identity theft is getting harder and harder for law enforcement and regular people to handle anyway.

I agree, the thought scares me shitless...but...who else can do it???

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
I'm thinking you all should head out to give blood along with your name, because shirley your DNA will be safe from data theft or Insurance Industry sale.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

143 million people could be affected

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Originally posted by second:
The same method should be used for identity theft. There’s no need to create mountains of regulations, which are uniformly despised by the credit industry. Instead, simply make the industry itself — and any institution that handles personal data — liable for the losses in both time and money currently borne by consumers. The responsible parties will do the rest themselves.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:

How do you put a price on any of that? Would somebody who was generally a healthy person not be compensated in any way compared to the examples above, even though their privacy was invaded just as much?

BTW... I did just mention the $50 thing in the post right before yours. I can't tell if you were verifying what I said or if you didn't see that I posted it already.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I agree with all of that.

Something similar happened in the 90's with the video game industry after games like Doom and Night Trap came out. Rather than allow the Government to get involved and start censoring things, the ESRB rating system was devised by the industry and any game that is licensed to sell on their platforms by Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are required by those companies to be rated before they hit the shelves. The makers of the games make sure to give them fair ratings and not try to sneak anything past the system because it could impact future business with the major console manufacturers if any scandals happen after release.

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Originally posted by second:

Likewise, the credit rating industry will need to be threatened by Congress.

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What happened the last 8 years though? This isn't exactly a new problem. Was everybody too high on "Hope and Change" to actually get anything positive done?= SIX

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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What happened the last 8 years though? This isn't exactly a new problem. Was everybody too high on "Hope and Change" to actually get anything positive done?= SIX

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No, they were too busy bailing out the banks, strenuously avoiding prosecuting the perpetrators of financial fraud, spying on us en masse, requiring that ALL of our health information be computerized (to make healthcare "cheaper" and "more efficient"), and avoiding passing meaningful re-regulation on the banks.

Good job, Obama!

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Obama could not have prepared us for corporate rape better than if he had tied us down spread-eagle himself.

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You howled in protest, and Equifax had no choice but to respond.

On Tuesday, the company said it would waive all fees until Nov. 21 for people who want to freeze their Equifax credit files. It will also refund any fees that anyone has paid since Thursday, though the company would not say whether this would be automatic.

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A reader named Kimberly Casey forwarded me an email exchange between her and Mr. Adams where he apologized and said that a service to “lock” Equifax, Experian and TransUnion files simultaneously would be coming soon.

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Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
You still didn't answer my question Second. Fine. Obama didn't have the power to do it (or the will to even talk about it, I might add). It wasn't that long ago when we had Democrats in the majority in both the house and senate while he was president. Identity theft was already a very big thing at that point. Why was nothing done with a congress that you insinuate would more likely pass regulations or at least threaten the action against those who hold our private information?

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Obama could not have prepared us for corporate rape better than if he had tied us down spread-eagle himself.- SIGNY
It is Congress that acts to prevent rape, not the President. It is as if you are a Russian who imagines President Obama had the power of President-for-Life Putin.

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111th United States Congress

The One Hundred Eleventh United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government from January 3, 2009, until January 3, 2011 ... In the November 4, 2008, elections, the Democratic Party increased its majorities in both chambers, giving President Obama a Democratic majority in the legislature for the first two years of his presidency. A new delegate seat was created for the Northern Mariana Islands. The 111th Congress had the most experienced members in history: at the start of the 111th Congress, the average member of the House had served 10.3 years, while the average Senator had served 13.4 years. This Congress has been considered one of the most productive Congresses in history in terms of legislation passed since the 89th Congress, during Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

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Apple's New "FaceID" Could Be A Powerful Mass Spying Tool

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

On Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by Apple users and is another cult favorite. But many are rightly skeptical of the “FaceID” feature.

FaceID, is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.

That seems minor on the surface, but the ramifications could be enormous.

It’s also highly possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the rights of the person to privacy.

But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new mass surveillance order.

While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day.

Apple’s new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.

According to Wired, this is a system already ripe for government abuse. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then Apple would provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match. Apple has a good record of fighting for user privacy, but there’s only so much the company could do if its objections to an order are turned down by the courts. And the government is already looking into how this could benefit them, but are hiding behind the guise of “privacy.” On Wednesday Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) released a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking how the company will handle the technology’s security and privacy implications.

But this type of sleazy “Big Brother” activity by the government is not new.

Over the last decade the government has increasingly embraced this type of mass scan method. Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed the existence of Upstream, a program under FISA Section 702 (set to expire in just a few months). With Upstream, the NSA scans all internet communications going into and out of the United States for surveillance targets’ emails, as well as IP addresses and what the agency has called cybersignatures. And last year Reuters revealed that Yahoo, in compliance with a government order, built custom software to scan hundreds of millions of email accounts for content that contained a digital signature used by surveillance targets. –Wired

Mass facial recognition scans are unconstitutional and a gross violation of human privacy rights. But that has yet to stop the overreaching government from its pursuit of an even more effective method of their goal of dystopian mass surveillance.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
ANOTHER APP TO AVOID: APPLE "FACE ID"

Because who doesn't want to voluntarily enter their face and profile into a face-recognition database?

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Apple's New "FaceID" Could Be A Powerful Mass Spying Tool

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

On Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by Apple users and is another cult favorite. But many are rightly skeptical of the “FaceID” feature.

FaceID, is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.

That seems minor on the surface, but the ramifications could be enormous.

It’s also highly possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the rights of the person to privacy.

But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new mass surveillance order.

While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day.

Apple’s new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.

According to Wired, this is a system already ripe for government abuse. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then Apple would provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match. Apple has a good record of fighting for user privacy, but there’s only so much the company could do if its objections to an order are turned down by the courts. And the government is already looking into how this could benefit them, but are hiding behind the guise of “privacy.” On Wednesday Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) released a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking how the company will handle the technology’s security and privacy implications.

But this type of sleazy “Big Brother” activity by the government is not new.

Over the last decade the government has increasingly embraced this type of mass scan method. Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed the existence of Upstream, a program under FISA Section 702 (set to expire in just a few months). With Upstream, the NSA scans all internet communications going into and out of the United States for surveillance targets’ emails, as well as IP addresses and what the agency has called cybersignatures. And last year Reuters revealed that Yahoo, in compliance with a government order, built custom software to scan hundreds of millions of email accounts for content that contained a digital signature used by surveillance targets. –Wired

Mass facial recognition scans are unconstitutional and a gross violation of human privacy rights. But that has yet to stop the overreaching government from its pursuit of an even more effective method of their goal of dystopian mass surveillance.

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"thinking? There's an app for that"

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Another Coverup? Equifax Accused Of Scrubbing That Its Chief Security Officer Was A Music Major

*****
Update: And... she's gone: EQUIFAX SAYS CIO AND CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER ARE RETIRING

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Meet Susan Mauldin, the Equifax Chief Information Security Officer, and the person who was responsible for keeping the highly confidential and secret information of over 100 million Americans well... highly confidential and secret.

Mauldin has been with Equifax as CSO / CISO since 2013. She was previously Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer at First Data Corporation, until July 2013. Mauldin was also SunTrust Banks’ Group Vice President from 2007 to 2009.

So far so good, but a problem emerges: according to LinkedIn, Mauldin’s stated educational background has no security or technology credentials, and consists of.... a bachelor’s degree in music composition (magna cum laude) and a Master of Fine Arts degree in music composition (summa cum laude), both from the University of Georgia. Once again, this is the person who was in charge of keeping your personal and financial data safe — and whose failure to do that have put 143 million at risk from identity theft and fraud.

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Or rather, that's what her LInkedIn profile would have disclosed if in the hours after the scandal broke, "someone" didn't thoroughly scrub and censor it.

As MarketWatch's Brett Arends writes, "there has been very little coverage so far of Susan Mauldin’s background and training. Given the ongoing disaster of the hack and Equifax’s handling of the affair, the media spotlight has so far been elsewhere." It now emerges that someone was very keen on keeping as little information about Mauldin's background in the public domain as possible.

Shortly after the Equifax scandal broke, Maludin's LinkedIn page was made private and her last name replaced with “M.” Below is a screengrab showing Susan Mauldin’s old and current LinkedIn pages in Google search results as of 9/9/2017.



A few days after the news of the data hacking broke, the following page reappeared a with a different url, with the specific detail that her degrees were in Music Composition removed. Also, her surname Mauldin was replaced with the initial letter M. to complicate profile discovery.

Among the skills touted on her LinkedIn page: Data Center, IT Solutions, PCI DSS, IT Service Management, IT Outsourcing.

Additionally, two videos of interviews with Mauldin have been removed from YouTube. A podcast of an interview has also been taken down. As Hollywoodlanews.com reports, in March 2016, Mauldin was interviewed on camera by the CEO of the big-data company Cazena.

The videos featuring parts of an interview with Susan Mauldin, which were embedded on this page, have been taken down as of the afternoon of September 10.

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A partial transcript of her remarks during the interview have been archived for posterity by a third party. http://archive.is/6M8mg

The full interview videos went far in explaining what may have been the eventual cause of the massive leak of information now gravely affecting 143 million Americans.

The audio-only version of the interview that was publicly available on Soundcloud has also been scrubbed from the web.

* * *

Unfortunately for the scrubbers, internet archives preserved her original LinkedIn profile (shown above) which revealed her "music" background, and a transcript of one interview has survived.

So as CEO Richard Smith prepares for the upcoming congressional grilling, here are two more questions he can add to the list: first,

How far can a Chief Security Officer go in this business without a formal education in technology? In an interview uncovered by Brett Arends he notes that Mauldin said that in recruiting, “[w]e’re looking for good analysts, whether it’s a data scientist, security analyst, network analyst, IT analyst, or even someone with an auditing degree. ... Security can be learned.”

But she also said she focuses college recruitment, understandably, on “universities that have programs in security, cyber security, or IT programs with security specialties.” She did not mention music composition.

And second, was the company actively involved in what appears to be an active campaign to scrub the potentially embarrassing background of its Chief "Security" Officer?

As Arends concludes, and we agree, "everything about this fiasco just gets more and more surreal." It will be even more surreal however if as a reader points out, a woman diversity hire is the reason behind one of the largest hacks of financially sensitive data ever...

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