New details emerge from Equifax breach, the hack is worse than previously thought

New documents provided by Equifax to senators revealed that the security breach suffered by the firm involved additional data for some customers.

In 2017 Equifax confirmed it has suffered a massive data breach, cyber criminals stole sensitive personal records of 145 million belonging to US citizens and hundreds of thousands Canada and in the UK.

Attackers exploited the CVE-2017-5638 Apache Struts vulnerability. The vulnerability affects the Jakarta Multipart parser upload function in Apache and could be exploited by an attacker to make a maliciously crafted request to an Apache web server.

The vulnerability was fixed back in March, but the company did not update its systems, the thesis was also reported by an Apache spokeswoman to the Reuters agency.

Compromised records include names, social security numbers, birth dates, home addresses, credit-score dispute forms, and for some users also the credit card numbers and driver license numbers.

Now experts argue the Equifax hack is worse than previously thought, according to documents provided by Equifax to the US Senate Banking Committee the attackers also stole taxpayer identification numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and credit card expiry dates belonging to some Equifax customers.

This means that crooks have all necessary data to arrange any king of fraud by steal victims’ identities.

“As your company continues to issue incomplete, confusing and contradictory statements and hide information from Congress and the public, it is clear that five months after the breach was publicly announced, Equifax has yet to answer this simple question in full: what was the precise extent of the breach?” criticized Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) who disclosed the documents.

Equifax pointed out that additional info exposed after the security breach are only related to a limit number of users.

Another curious thing to observe about the Equifax case, it that C-Level management was allowed to retire with multi-million dollar severance pays.

On Monday, the company announced Jamil Farshchi as its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), he replaces Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin, who retired from the company after the data breach was disclosed in late 2017.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Data Breach, hacking)

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