September 09, 2017•Update: September 09, 2017
By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
Shares of credit monitoring company Equifax slid 13.5 percent Friday after the company announced that hackers stole the personal information of an estimated 143 million Americans.
Equifax announced late Thursday that it was the victim of a huge cyberattack between May and July this year. It said the hackers were able to steal data including names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and driver's license numbers. They were also able to steal the credit card numbers of around 209,000 people.
The company said the attack was discovered and stopped on July 29.
Regulatory filings showed that three top executives sold about $1.8 million worth of Equifax stock in early August, days after discovering the security breach.
Equifax did not respond to a request for comment.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Friday his office was opening an investigation into Equifax.
“The Equifax breach has potentially exposed sensitive personal information of nearly everyone with a credit report, and my office intends to get to the bottom of how and why this massive hack occurred,” Schneiderman said in a statement.
The sensitivity of the information breached in the attack makes the Equifax attack notable, according to Idan Udi Edry, CEO of cybersecurity company Trustifi. Edry explained that nearly 90 percent of American adults with credit scores were impacted in what he calls the “Hurricane Irma of the cybersecurity world”.
“This is the mother of the attacks on the cyber world,” he said in an interview. “The credit bureau holds information on not only the credit lines of people and their scores but also Social Security numbers, addresses, past addresses, family members, bank accounts and some criminal records – a lot of information that can be used against the people. This is a major, major problem for the credit bureau today.”
“One of the problems we are facing at the moment is all of the information at credit bureaus and financial industries is actually being held in one basket, which causes a very big vulnerability for our privacy,” Edry added.
