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Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#61

Post by turc1656 »

tyingq wrote: post #45
plandis wrote: post #21

> As part of our ongoing commitment to performance, reliability and security, Equifax Workforce Solutions will be servicing The Work Number starting Sunday, October 8, 2017. This will result in temporary service interruptions; if you have received this notice please call our service center at 866-222-5880 to complete your transaction. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Convenient that Equifax is doing…

There's an alternate set here, still up and running. https://secure.w2.talx.com/popups/findemployer.aspx https://secure.w2.talx.com/PreAuthenticated/employerEntry.as...

Thanks, but despite the page loading this doesn't seem to be working. I found my employer and even after clicking the radio button for the result, it then tells me that code is not found, which makes no sense, obviously, unless they have disabled it without putting up the maintenance page.

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#62

Post by rtkwe »

joegosse wrote: post #40
jdenning wrote: post #13

Is it legal for employers to provide salary data on particular employees without permission?

Under FCRA, your employer or potential employer must get permission from you before performing any credit report (which includes a salary report). >You must give your consent for reports to be provided to employers. A consumer reporting agency may not give out information about you to your employer, or a potential employer, without your written consent given to the employer. Written consent generally is not required…

I think they were asking the opposite. If there were protections preventing that data from being given to the reporting companies in the first place.

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#63

Post by takeda »

Ok, so I wasn't able to find any of my employers there, and after looking more at the site, isn't that service something similar to companies like ADP who take care of doing payroll that employer voluntarily signs up and provides the information?

Because mine initial impression was that this site uses credit information to disclose every person's salary.

In that case I guess the main issue here is just that the information is not well protected, especially after recent leak.

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#64

Post by noddy1 »

couple of thoughts:

1) If the value of the individual damages related to this breach are in excess of the market cap of the equifax company, all company stock should be seized and distributed equally among those affected by the breach.

2) In the future, if a company controls this amount of sensitive data, they should have mandatory breach insurance. This means that they are covered for a government mandated amount based on the legal liability if all their data was lost. This will mean that the insurers will do in-depth audits of the data security of the company, and they will be incentivized year-to-year to ensure their security practices are top notch. The present system incentivizes each CEO to have a head-in-the-sand approach to data security where a hack is considered a long-tail event unlikely to happen during the ceo's 3-5 year tenure and therefore is not really worth paying attention to. In addition, it would ensure that if the potential damage done if data is leaked far exceeds the value of the business storing the data, the insurance will be prohibitively expensive and the company will not be able to continue with this line of business - as it should be.

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#65

Post by mjevans »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #6

> The service is designed to provide automated employment and income verification for prospective employers, and tens of thousands of companies report employee salary data to it. It sounds like companies can easily use this to collude against employee wages and benefits.

Maybe it's time to just make tax returns (and therefore salaries) part of the public record.

I think that transparency could make for a more fair process and also level negotiation since the compensation would then be about the role and how good someone is actually rated, rather than about how much they happened to have been paid in the past or how good they are about lying about it.

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#66

Post by MrLeap »

mikestew wrote: post #39
codewritinfool wrote: post #2

Why are these people still in business?

"Still in business"? Hell, not only that, their stock continues to go up after bouncing off what appears to be the bottom. Which makes me torn, because despite wanting very much to see Equifax and those of their ilk go out of business, I have a bunch of call options I bought when it looked like low 90s was about as low as they were going to go. I still hold those options (though they're set to expire in about two wee…

I call those BP oil spill trades. Starts with a surprise events that is seemingly catastrophic. If real consequences require special government action -- the consequences will be underwhelming and easily mitigable. If you believe there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, there's no problem profiting off this effect!

See: BP oil spill, HSBC money laundering scandal, Wells Fargo fraudulent account scandal, Equifax data leak, United Airlines beating up a passenger... I know I'm forgetting some.

I'm pretty sure you could beat the yearly S&P's performance in a single trade for any of those events.

Apple having to delay a new iphone release would have a more significant long term effect on that company's stock price than workers at foxxconn facilities killing themselves

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#67

Post by justifier »

brianwawok wrote: post #59
justifier wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some people 'suck' at negotiating then that must mean there are others who are 'better' at negotiating If I have a guardian who pays my rent so that i can take 6months to high ball offers to finally find a job that will pay me a high wage does that mean I'm 'better' at negotiating?

What stops you from taking the first job you find, and then spending 6 months while working looking for better jobs? It hardly is THAT hard to get some competing offers. And if you can't be bothered, I guess you don't really want it anyway?

> What stops [someone]..

Interviews scheduled during work hours, already working multiple jobs, burnout, lack of openings in your field

> It hardly is THAT hard to get some competing offers. And if you can't be bothered, I guess you don't really want it anyway?

This sentiment signals bias

Competing offers? For what? Serving coffee? Washing dishes? DBA? CTO?

If you offer anyone with a job more money my guess is 100% would take the extra cash, so just because they fail to find, or look, for more cash how does it imply they 'don't really want it anyway'?

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#68

Post by siegecraft »

joering2 wrote: post #23
nsxwolf wrote: post #19

I didn't know this existed at all. I thought they just made phone calls to your previous employer and asked. Are we allowed to see what's in it? I mean normally, not just when there's a data breach (and it looks like they shut it all down right now). Because when you get asked this on an interview, what's the "right" answer? There's base pay, bonuses, 401k match, all kinds of stuff. So the "right" answer is up in the…

Have you ever logged into Credit Karma? I wholehearty recommend it just to see how much information they are pulling, fully automatic up to seven days ago. Its not only my salary month by month, but also all my bank accounts, all credit card account all with amount I owe, amounts and history I paid, everything! Full front-face info, straight from credit reporting bureaus! :|

Is it possible Credit Karma shows self-reported "monthly income" statements you have made when applying for credit?

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#69

Post by mjevans »

brianwawok wrote: post #59
justifier wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some people 'suck' at negotiating then that must mean there are others who are 'better' at negotiating If I have a guardian who pays my rent so that i can take 6months to high ball offers to finally find a job that will pay me a high wage does that mean I'm 'better' at negotiating?

What stops you from taking the first job you find, and then spending 6 months while working looking for better jobs? It hardly is THAT hard to get some competing offers. And if you can't be bothered, I guess you don't really want it anyway?

Starting anything new is a drain on resources. Someone with time to focus on interviewing is bound to be better than someone with a new job they need to figure out. After all, it usually takes a few months to get anyone up to speed in a job, and this is assuming they're giving lots of effort.

For existing jobs? Inertia is probably a factor there, as well as fear of the unknown. When you've got something to loose it's different than having nothing to loose.

Re: Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History

#70

Post by nowarninglabel »

mjevans wrote: post #65
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #6

> The service is designed to provide automated employment and income verification for prospective employers, and tens of thousands of companies report employee salary data to it. It sounds like companies can easily use this to collude against employee wages and benefits.

Maybe it's time to just make tax returns (and therefore salaries) part of the public record. I think that transparency could make for a more fair process and also level negotiation since the compensation would then be about the role and how good someone is actually rated, rather than about how much they happened to have been paid in the past or how good they are about lying about it.

It'd be great to read the arguments against making them public. There's good reasons why we should make them public available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/business/yourtaxes/14discl...

Secrecy is good in many places, but I can't think of why it is good for tax returns, asides from perhaps allowing criminals to more easily target those with high incomes?

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