What is Equifax?
- Equifax is one of the country's three major credit bureaus, collecting information on millions of consumers and businesses in order to produce credit scores.
How do they get consumers' information?
- Banks, Credit Unions, and other lenders report information to Credit Reporting Agencies such as Equifax.
What went wrong?
- Hackers stole personal information belonging to millions of individuals, including names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in a smaller number of cases, credit card numbers.
How do I find out if I was affected?
- Mark Cather already wrote a piece in the DoIT group on this breach, outlining what to do: https://my.umbc.edu/groups/doit/posts/70109
- For more information, see this post from the FTC: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2017/09/equifax-data-breach-what-do