Wednesday, December 15, 2021
On September 7, 2017, Equifax disclosed a breach exposing the Social Security numbers and personal data of about 147 million Americans to identity thieves.
On this day in 2017, the credit bureau Equifax admitted that hackers had stolen the personal data of about a hundred and forty-seven million Americans, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, and addresses. The breach had gone on for months through a known software flaw the company had failed to patch.
What unsettled people was that they had never chosen to do business with Equifax at all. The company collected and held their most sensitive information in the background, so the victims were not customers who could take their business elsewhere, they were the product being tracked, and they had no say in how it was guarded.
The lesson is that your identity is exposed through systems you cannot see. Freezing your credit, watching your accounts, and treating your personal data as something to guard closely are the practical defense against identity theft in a world that quietly hoards it.
