Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
601–610 of 670 posts
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably for good reason. $500 per class member is an insanely high damages estimate. 99.9% of people will suffer zero damages because their identities will not be stolen. Even the ones who do have their identities stolen will likely be made whole by the credit card companies. The real damages here are going to be to the banks and credit card companies that will have to absorb the costs of all the fraud. As to the Ti…
"Even the ones who do have their identities stolen will likely be made whole by the credit card companies." Fraudulent charges on a credit card are the least of my concerns. This opens us up to a lifetime of identity theft and insecure accounts of every sort. I'm not even sure how they can approach remedying the problem. Coordinate with the SSA to get 150 million people new SSNs at the least.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would people need new SSNs? It was the credit industry that misused them as combination of unique identifier and authenticator, and that is not the SSA's responsibility to fix. The government even tried to curb misuse of the SSN, but it was not binding on private entities, and they just ignored it. The solution, whatever it is, does not include anyone continuing to pretend that the SSN is now or has ever been sui…
You're absolutely correct. We should move to a well designed identity system. However I'd SWAG the development and deployment of such a system around 10-15 years if all of the involved parties were on-board. Equifax could provide the SSA a pile of money and the victims could have a reasonably effective defense against identity theft within months.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could we create a service that automates most of the work required to sue in SCC?
Am an attorney. You could create a system that'd help you file SCC complaints quickly, but to have it detailed enough to pass the defendant lawyer's complaints about the deficiencies in your documents would be difficult. The size of that problem, however, decreases with the narrowness of the subject matter you want to cover/make claims about. If it were a 'Sue Equifax For The 2017 Data Breach' service, then it might…
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm amazed these events don't seem to shake the american love for credit cards. Like now you've seen what happens in the extra layers between you and the money, I wish people would go back on the poison pill and maybe switch to debit cards.
Credit cards are great because if someone steals mine and makes fraudulent charges, they're stealing Chase's money, not mine. (In theory if someone steals money through your debit card you can get it back... in theory. I'd like to avoid ever having to find out how well this works in practice).
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#606To be honest, I feel bad for the engineering team at Equifax. The vulnerability that compromised their system was a bug in an open-source Java library, Apache Struts, and security researchers only noticed it a few days ago. It seems that the Equifax team had very little time to react and update their software. In some sense, I feel that more blame should be placed on the engineers who built the highly popular open-so…
I would have expected this type of data to be stored in such a way that even if someone got access to one of their web/application servers they wouldn't be able to dump 143 million records from it without serious red flags going off.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulators selected and overseen by elected officials aren't a foolproof solution either. Sometimes you end up with Scott Pruitt [1] running the EPA, whose objectives are apparently a) denying that climate change exists, and b) dismantling any environmental protections that businesses find inconvenient. The self-appointed lawyer regulators at least have an incentive to do their jobs: they get a bunch of money. [1] ht…
He didn't say foolproof; he said better.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where are the blockchain proponents? Oh, right, this kind of thing isn't a pyramid scheme. It would be a lot of grunt work and wouldn't be worth a VC investment.
I can hear it coming now... A VC backed military contrator is right now creating MilChain and DarpaCoins.
Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#609Re: Equifax Faces Multibillion-Dollar Lawsuit Over Hack
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ever hear of civil forfeiture? Yes, a process in which the government has to prove to the same standard of evidence as someone suing you. That is due process.
> Yes, a process in which the government has to prove to the same standard of evidence as someone suing you. That's not quite true. They don't make a claim against _you_. They make a claim against the property. So, it's the same level of evidence and adversarial hearings as someone suing $1,000. This is not due process. It's a farce.