The Chief Security Officer's credentials are a degree in music[1]! I wish I was kidding.
Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
341–350 of 670 posts
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#342So let me get this right, this company collects credit information and someone hacked into their web server and stole highly sensitive information about most of the adult american population. Then the executives sold their stock a day before they announced the hack to the public. Besides the troubling fact that you still use social security and credit card numbers as any form of reliable authentication, how aren't th…
No amount of governmental regulations can solve the current date breach trends. Even government's own intel agencies got hacked too. No organization is immune to data breaches. It's a matter of time and effort. A lot of us here are engineers and coders. It's our responsibility to design better architecture, security conscious protocols and write securer softwares. And it's up to all of us (regardless which country yo…
true. I once worked at a bank and we used a 3rd party data warehouse web solution to get started with a new business. 6 months into it, i noticed that I could access cross customer information by modifying local javascript variables. When I brought this up to my manager he told me to patch this up asap. which i did, using MD5, because i was a jr engineer back then and didn't know any better (and apparently neither did my manager, nor the creators of that data warehouse)
my point being, without guidelines, or regulations, or some sort of security rating standard, managers will continue to make these mistakes.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#343So let me get this right, this company collects credit information and someone hacked into their web server and stole highly sensitive information about most of the adult american population. Then the executives sold their stock a day before they announced the hack to the public. Besides the troubling fact that you still use social security and credit card numbers as any form of reliable authentication, how aren't th…
> I can already hear Americans preach to me how the free market is great and solves all your problems.
This sort of nationalistic flamebait (pro or con, doesn't matter) breaks this site's rules. Would you please read them and follow them when commenting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On HN we're hoping for at least a slightly higher standard of civility than is common on the internet. Given how strong the forces of polarization (of all kinds) have been as of late, that's something we need everybody here to pitch in with.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should a sound approach, then, not be, to incorporate one-self at birth? What if A Person were to be born into a corporation and all transactions made by thhem be the corporations actions - if things go south, dissolve the company. (clearly this is simplistic, but you get the idea) I want to re-form myself into one of these corporations which has little retribution for actions. I shall pledge 10% of SamStave INC LLC…
Indeed, this seems only logical. I honestly have this thought every time I make a large financial decision: Renting a house? Would be much easier to break the lease (Should I ever need to) if my surrogate 'corporation' with few assets were the leasee. Ditto with many medical situations/other large expenses. Plus, much better tax deductions!
> Would be much easier to break the lease (Should I ever need to) if my surrogate 'corporation' with few assets were the leasee
You'll risk losing the assets. If the assets aren't substantial, it's unlikely any landlord will sign the lease with the entity without someone guaranteeing it.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#345Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#346Ok, so credit reporting agency collects sensitive personal and financial data on basically every adult American, loses it to a bunch of criminals and now I have to deal with the consequences? I looked into credit freezes yesterday. This is really a total scam. You have to _call_ each of the three agencies and pay a fee ($5 to $10) each time. If you need to unfreeze your report to make a legitimate credit application…
hmm i called the 3 mentioned here today and all were free.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faq...
Equifax — 1-800-349-9960
Experian — 1‑888‑397‑3742
TransUnion — 1-888-909-8872Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#347So let me get this right, this company collects credit information and someone hacked into their web server and stole highly sensitive information about most of the adult american population. Then the executives sold their stock a day before they announced the hack to the public. Besides the troubling fact that you still use social security and credit card numbers as any form of reliable authentication, how aren't th…
If there was insider trading on the breach information, they'll be in the slammer soon enough. It would be pretty stupid, considering how easy it would be to get caught, and to avoid a mere ~14% decline on your share value? Yes, people can be stupid and greedy. I guess we'll see if this applies to these execs.
And we already know they are stupid and greedy because of the hack.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#348I'd love to see the $70B number pan out (though $500 per person is less than the damages, I think) -- Equifax is a $17B company, and would presumably stop existing if that happened. On the other hand, these things always settle out of court, and Equifax certainly won't settle the suit for more than they're worth. I said it elsewhere, but I think the right response is to opt out of the class, and sue for $1000 in smal…
But then you would have to show $1000 of actual personal damage, which I doubt few if any can, unless you're thinking Equifax will just settle these one after another. But they're just as capable of multiplying out how many of these will have to happen before the losses devastate them like you just did and at some point will actually show up and make you prove your case.
You would have to do that if the case were actually litigated. The cost to Equifax to defend the case would be, at the very least, several hundred dollars, thousands, more likely.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#349Is it time for a Federal Department of Verifying Whether People Are Who They Say They Are? Veryifying identity with SSN is broken. The right way is probably more or less how big webapps do it - MFA + a password that the user can reset by providing a bunch of info. The government has the necessary private info to do this in most cases (e.g. DL# plus your income from last year's taxes), and can fall back to "Show up at…
Won't work. Once companies start gathering private data stored in this DB, it can be compromised and government isn't that great at securing data either. MFA would required everyone having a smart phone or RSA key fobs. SMS/Phone based authentication isn't secure. Only real way to get true identity system is biometrics(Fingerprints,DNA, or Iris) taken at birth. But that will never happen for privacy reasons.
Biometric has its own problems. What's a fingerprint but a password you can't change?
Any secret can be stolen, bio or otherwise. The key to robust ongoing identity is not a better shared secret, it's a better way of recovering from theft of shared secrets. One way is to have a big trove of non-secret-but-not-public data, like prevous addresses and employers (which is how the credit bureaus sometimes authenticate people). Who has more such info to draw from than the government? Another is to use shared info that goes stale quickly, e.g. "What magazine did you get in the mail yesterday?" Again, the government, by virtue of being the government, already has candidate info to draw from.
And what if all else fails, if some super-hacker has stolen or has ongoing access to every single piece of digital information that could be used to authenticate you? If you're a startup or a corporation or an open source project, you throw up your hands. If you're the government, you say "Please visit your nearest police department and bring your photo ID and some utility bills."
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that this is the only good solution. Like someone else in this thread said, Identity is hard. There's no silver bullet to make it a tractable problem, but you can throw enormous resources at it. And in the government's case, the most costly part (building a brick-and-mortar office in every city, town, village and hamlet in America and staffing it with humans) has already been paid.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#350This is the kind of thing that should end/bankrupt a company.