It doesn’t matter if China hacked Equifax – By Violet Blue (Engadget) / Feb 14 2020
Hop on the cybersecurity hayride from hell.
On Monday the FBI and AG Barr announced “an indictment last week charging four members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with hacking into the computer systems of the credit reporting agency Equifax and stealing Americans’ personal data and Equifax’s valuable trade secrets.” China’s military refutes the charges.
It was a message of PR reprieve for the skinsuits at Equifax, who spend their life cycles profiting from tracking and trading our personal and financial information (and we’re powerless to stop them). Especially now as we’re seeing reports about how four Chinese hackers “took down Equifax.”
That sure sounds a lot better (for them) than the fact that Equifax’s security failures were so bad for so long that a breach was inevitable. One month after Equifax admitted the breach, press and pundits remarked on the multitude of issues saying it was probable “that more than one group of hackers broke into the company.”
Yeah, something makes me think China’s hackers are more of the “hoarders” variety, not the ‘sing Kumbaya’ sharing kind — and our stolen Equifax data was definitely shared. “Katie Van Fleet of Seattle says she’s spent months trying to regain her stolen identity, and says it has been stolen more than a dozen times,” reported NBC. “I didn’t sign up to use Equifax, so I feel all of that stuff has been taken, and now I am left here trying to sweep up the pieces and just trying to protect myself and protect my credit,” Van Fleet said.
And that’s the thing: None of us signed up for Equifax. Yet here we are.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before
Continue to article: https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/14/it-does-not-matter-if-china-hacked-equifax/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=internal&utm_source=dl
