The great Equifax mystery: 17 months later, the stolen data has never been found

“On September 7, 2017, the world heard an alarming announcement from credit ratings giant Equifax: In a brazen cyber-attack, somebody had stolen sensitive personal information from more than 140 million people, nearly half the population of the U.S.,” Kate Fazzini reports for CNBC. “It was the consumer data security scandal of the decade. The information included social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, information from credit disputes and other personal details. CEO Richard Smith stepped down under fire. Lawmakers changed credit freeze laws and instilled new regulatory oversight of credit ratings agencies.”
“Then, something unusual happened. The data disappeared. Completely,” Fazzini reports. “CNBC talked to eight experts, including data ‘hunters’ who scour the dark web for stolen information, senior cybersecurity managers, top executives at financial institutions, senior intelligence officials who played a part in the investigation and consultants who helped support it. All of them agreed that a breach happened, and personal information from 143 million people was stolen. But none of them knows where the data is now. It’s never appeared on any hundreds of underground websites selling stolen information. Security experts haven’t seen the data used for in any of the ways they’d expect in a theft like this — not for impersonating victims, not for accessing other websites, nothing.”
Fazzini reports, “Most experts familiar with the case now believe that the thieves were working for a foreign government, and are using the information not for financial gain, but to try and identify and recruit spies.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, one would certainly have expected major problems long before now if the data including Social Security numbers and other such sensitive personal information were floating around.
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