So you may have heard about a small hack on Equifax’s website that may affect over 140 million people in the US – pretty close to half of the adult population. It’s a pretty big deal since Equifax is a credit reporting agency and has very, very personal data about people.
However, you may not have heard that they were compromised AGAIN. An independent analyst found that one of their pages was affected. Essentially it would redirect the user to download a Flash Player update that would download malware onto the user’s computer instead.
How does this keep happening?
Maybe this is actually the new normal. On September 7th they announced they had had a security breach from May to late July, but it’s been speculated that they may have been compromised a while before that and just didn’t know it – and then they had to address the problem before announcing it to the world.
It could just be that hackers and scammers will always evolve and create more and more complex codes to find cracks in the security. Equifax apparently had another breach in their website, but maybe there are plenty of security breaches like that on other websites that just go unnoticed. It’s hard to say.
That’s not good.
No, it’s definitely not a good thing to realize that plenty of websites that SHOULD be secure and have a ton of private information may not be secure enough. However, it’s the logical way to think about it moving forward.
It’s very possible that over the next few years more and more large companies reveal that they’re getting hacked. Obviously, Equifax is a credit reporting agency, so they probably have more valuable information than other large companies so they’ve got more to lose.
It’s also very possible that these are just isolated incidents and that Equifax has been negligent, but we shouldn’t bank on that being the truth.
What can we do?
Well realistically, we can just monitor our accounts and try to ensure that we report anything that looks sketchy. But in the long-run, it’s hard to do something to stay 100% protected 100% of the time. Continue being careful, and monitor your bank account.
Even Sonic has admitted to having some of their information compromised recently. I don’t plan to stop eating out or buying things at my local grocer – and you probably don’t either. But I can pay attention to my debit and credit cards and make sure to report anything suspicious.