The Equifax data breach post-mortem was a wake-up call

The recent Equifax data breach ‘post-mortem’ that was completed, after a full overhaul and review of exactly what had happened was, a wake-up call, Data Leak Lawyers say.

Many people didn’t even know that Equifax had their data because it had been passed on to them as part of credit referencing checks, meaning a lot of people were surprised when they received the letter notifying them that they had been affected by the breach.

The final information about exactly what was exposed in the monumental hack that broke in the news last year served as a stark reminder about the vulnerability of personal data and was a wake-up call in terms of the scale and severity of the breach.

Equifax has no viable defence over the data breach that exposed millions of people’s data. They failed to update a known security patch, and their systems failed to detect the ongoing vulnerability. For any organisation, this is an unforgivable error, and not an honest oversight; and for a company of the size and stature of Equifax, it is simply untenable that it even happened.

But it has happened, and our Data Leak Lawyers are now representing a large number of people who have been affected who have come forward for our help to claim data breach compensation, and our firm reminds people that the Equifax data breach really was a stark wake-up call.

The breach exposed:

• Names and Dates of birth: over 146 million;
• Addresses: over 100 million;
• Genders: over 27 million;
• Phone numbers: over 20 million;
• Drivers’ license information: 17.6 million;
• Email Addresses: 1.8 million.

The initially reported number of people affected in the UK eventually doubled, which was also a worrying element to the incident. It meant that, not only did Equifax let the valuable and sensitive data they hold become exposed and remained exposed for a prolonged period of time, but it couldn’t initially account for the data that had been breached.

The Equifax data breach turned out to be far worse than anyone originally thought.

In the cold aftermath of the Equifax data breach post-mortem, we’re left wondering: who will be next to expose our personal and sensitive data, and will they feel the full force of the new GDPR that came into being last week?

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