Pierluigi Paganini March 02, 2018

The results of the forensic investigation on the massive Equifax hack revealed additional 2.4 Million identities were involved in the security incident.

The massive Equifax hack made the headlines again, new revelations about the security breach emerge in the last hours.

The credit bureau company announced this week it identified an additional 2.4 million American consumers affected by 2017 hack.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, experts argued 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.

Now the results of the forensic investigation revealed additional 2.4 Million identities were involved in the security incident.

“This is not about newly discovered stolen data,” explained Paulino do Rego Barros, ad interim chief executive at Equifax.

“It’s about sifting through the previously identified stolen data, analyzing other information in our databases that was not taken by the attackers, and making connections that enabled us to identify additional individuals.”

The US company still hasn’t notified the newly identified consumers because their social security numbers were not exposed in the hack, hackers only accessed their partial driver’s license information.

Equifax announced it would notify the newly identified consumers and will offer them identity theft protection and credit file monitoring services.

The company is now facing federal investigations as well as class-action lawsuits over the massive hack.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Equifax, hacking)

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