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Thread: Equifax leak?

  1. #41
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    I have an person report now of trouble freezing at Equifax, so the site for freezing credit cards at Equifax is most certainly buggy, sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. The other sites seem to be consistently working correctly. Yea isn't it ironic, the only reasn anyone is even doing this freezing cr@p is because of Equifax and there site doesn't reliably work for it!
    Trees don't grow on money

  2. #42
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ApatheticNoMore View Post
    Yea isn't it ironic, the only reasn anyone is even doing this freezing cr@p is because of Equifax and there site doesn't reliably work for it!
    My guess is that the IT honchos there never figured on so many people trying to freeze their credit at one time and the system is bogged down from the load. Then again, these same honchos apparently never figured on whatever vector the thieves used to steal the data. So let's just say they're not particularly good at their jobs...
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  3. #43
    Williamsmith
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    I have tried numerous times all three websites for the credit report ....let's just call them honchos SteveinMN.....the honchos websites work about as well as the government Obamacare website did when it was launched. I can't get anywhere. I then went to the annualcreditreport.com website to at least request my free annual credit report and low and behold, it pretty much just shoots you over to the honchos websites and they are brick walls. Now it is ironic that the people they are suppose to serve, can't get the information that they need or block the information so that further harm is minimized but yet nefarious actors can seize anything they want.

    Now this breach occurred oh anywhere from two months to six months ago depending the source and yet nothing has been stated as to who or what entity might have gotten the info. There is a stinking skunk in the woodpile here. Someone has already made a pallet load of cash on this.

    I am considering mailing to each credit report company a request for a copy of my credit report......hard copy by snail mail.....and a credit report freeze. Certified mail, return receipt .

    Now just imagine you do get them to freeze you credit reporting....then you need a thaw so that you can get a house or a car but these honchos are not responding or their websites are frozen.... .wouldnt that be insult to injury?

  4. #44
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    Quote Originally Posted by Williamsmith View Post
    I have tried numerous times all three websites for the credit report ....let's just call them honchos SteveinMN.....the honchos websites work about as well as the government Obamacare website did when it was launched. I can't get anywhere. I then went to the annualcreditreport.com website to at least request my free annual credit report and low and behold, it pretty much just shoots you over to the honchos websites and they are brick walls. Now it is ironic that the people they are suppose to serve, can't get the information that they need or block the information so that further harm is minimized but yet nefarious actors can seize anything they want.

    Now this breach occurred oh anywhere from two months to six months ago depending the source and yet nothing has been stated as to who or what entity might have gotten the info. There is a stinking skunk in the woodpile here. Someone has already made a pallet load of cash on this.

    I am considering mailing to each credit report company a request for a copy of my credit report......hard copy by snail mail.....and a credit report freeze. Certified mail, return receipt .

    Now just imagine you do get them to freeze you credit reporting....then you need a thaw so that you can get a house or a car but these honchos are not responding or their websites are frozen.... .wouldnt that be insult to injury?
    I wonder how many states AG's are getting letters with the same questions your asking?

  5. #45
    Senior Member Rogar's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Williamsmith View Post
    Now just imagine you do get them to freeze you credit reporting....then you need a thaw so that you can get a house or a car but these honchos are not responding or their websites are frozen.... .wouldnt that be insult to injury?
    To rub salt into the wound, I've been reading that the credit agencies may be the bigger risk, but I've seen that the hacked information is basically enough to assume your identity and could include applying for government benefits. One article recommended filing taxes as early as possible just in case someone is going to file a fraudulent return in your name. I could picture an ambitious person figuring out how to access some personal bank and brokerage accounts, but that doesn't seem too likely. I would just guess there is a market for valid socials to sell to undocumented immigrants.

    Whether laws were broken, I don't know, but some sort of corrective action to prevent this from happening again is in order.

  6. #46
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    One article recommended filing taxes as early as possible just in case someone is going to file a fraudulent return in your name.
    yes but as anyone who has ever held a taxable investment knows this isn't always possible as even though you are supposed to be given all information by the end of January (which is already LATE for filling early) often this is not the case, and the information one needs to file does not exist ANYWHERE (not in the mail AND not online) yet because it hasn't been created yet (well the actual tax forms haven't, maybe we should all forget about having tax forms to file, and just estimate everything for ourselves. One can always file an amended return I suppose ...). A far more doable course that this non-practical advice, might be to under-withhold, so no refund is possible, at worse you pay a penalty for that.

    F@#$ our government you know just F it. They give this utter BS advice knowing full well brokerages don't comply in sending information early. They do absolutely nothing to enforce compliance on their part (but it's all the @## individual's filing a 1040s responsibility, isn't everything, some little person's responsibility?). And far more centrally, as the brokers are somewhat peripheral really, they do nothing to pursue tax fraud, which really truly is completely and entirely on them. I'm sorry but what sorry government do we have that can't adequately pursue fraud on it's own tax filings? I know there is politics behind this but it's all garbage, the IRS should be funded enough to and should take tax fraud seriously period.
    Trees don't grow on money

  7. #47
    Yppej
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    I'm thinking the Social Security administration should just issue everyone new numbers and Equifax should pay for the administrative costs. But I suppose that is as likely as Mexico paying for the wall.

  8. #48
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Williamsmith View Post
    I can't get anywhere. I then went to the annualcreditreport.com website to at least request my free annual credit report and low and behold, it pretty much just shoots you over to the honchos websites and they are brick walls. Now it is ironic that the people they are suppose to serve, can't get the information that they need or block the information so that further harm is minimized but yet nefarious actors can seize anything they want.
    My last job in Corporate America was in computer performance testing -- determining how well Web sites and applications hold up when they're loaded with users. Interesting detective work (if it hadn't been for the steaming pile of software we were required to use to do the testing)! Anyway, I'm guessing Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, and annualcreditreport.com are bogged down with pretty much every American trying to get there to request and/or put fraud alerts and freezes on their credit reports. Not that that helps you, particularly.

    I will note that when I'm trying to get to a very busy Web site I have much greater success trying early in the morning (say, before 9 Eastern Time) or overnight. You may run into maintenance at these sites as they try to bring additional capacity on-line. Or you may simply be competing with fewer users at those times. Either way, it's less frustrating -- or at least you don't have to wait so long to be frustrated.

    One more public-service announcement: unfreezing your report (at least at Equifax) requires you keep track of a PIN provided to you when you freeze the report. I printed mine out; the page will go to the safe deposit box. But I also created a PDF of it and stored that file in one of my clouds. Yeah, clouds can be insecure, too, so I chose a better one. But lose that piece of paper and you are ^&#%ed. And I'll be on-line anyway if I need to unfreeze the report.


    While I generally am of the "give folks a break" school, Equifax's response to this issue has been abominable -- almost like a kid with his/her hand in the cookie jar (but with much higher stakes). I hope some executive heads will roll over this. I wouldn't mind seeing Equifax disappear under the waves for good. I hope someone puts the fear of god into them. Given who's in charge of that these days, I'm not expecting much.

    But what I really hope we pull out of this is to quit using an insecure identification number -- the SSN -- which was never designed for this kind of thing. With today's capabilities, it's possible to come up with numbers which are far more resistant to tampering. Using the SSN is just laziness.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  9. #49
    Williamsmith
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    Appreciate the insight.....I'm about at the point where I am pretty much glad I haven't succeeded because frankly, I expect they are expending most of their resources on minimizing their liability, planning an exit strategy for the higher ups that include a golden parachute, figuring out what schmuck is going to be the skapegoat, shredding and burning and deleting all traces of responsibility for leaving the information unprotected, ......well you get the idea.

    By now I expect my SSN and related personal information including the name of my first dog, first car, dads middle name, favorite sports team, best man at my wedding, and the length of my penis has been sold at least one hundred times over. So I'll just sit back and hope at least they grease it up first.

  10. #50
    Senior Member jp1's Avatar
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    As a completely random and somewhat selfish aside, I sell cyber insurance for a living. By some stroke of luck (or prudent underwriting on the part of our national accounts team perhaps...) my employer is not anywhere on Equifax's cyber insurance tower. Word on the insurance street is that the whole tower is pathetically small for their exposure. Somewhere between $70M and $100M, which will get wiped out in no time and be nowhere near what this breach will cost them. My biggest competitor has the primary $15M layer for Equifax. A good friend is the cyber lead in their SF office. It's been really hard resisting the urge to send her a nice congratulations note. This one breach represents approximately 7.5% of their annual cyber premium.

    For an idea of what this might ultimately cost, Target's breach which was much less serious since SSN's weren't included, last I read it had cost them around $300M in direct costs and they only had a $100M tower. Before this breach if I had been underwriting the primary layer for Equifax I would have wanted to get somewhere north of $1M premium for a $10M layer. In the current market I'm betting that my competitor didn't even get $1M for a $15M limit. They may not have even gotten $750k for $15M limit. Since the rest of the tower's pricing would be based, at least somewhat, off the primary pricing I can see why my company didn't end up participating.

    Lots of carriers have been jumping into the cyber insurance marketplace, viewing it as an easy way to make new revenue since lots of businesses don't currently purchase so it's one of the few true growth areas in the insurance world. This has resulted in a free-fall in the price of cyber insurance. Hopefully this breach will stabilize things at least for a while. Especially as carriers also have to deal with the massive property claims that are undoubtedly coming from the recent hurricanes.

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