UK Fallout From The Massive Breach At Equifax
It's been a year since the credit monitoring company Equifax admitted it had suffered one of the largest data breaches in recent memory, exposing the personal information of a whopping 143 million US consumers.
Today The UK Information Commissioner’s Office has issued Equifax’ UK subsidiarty Ltd with a £500,000 fine for failing to protect the personal information of up to 15 million UK citizens during a cyber attack in 2017.
The ICO investigation found that, although the information systems in the US were compromised, Equifax Ltd was responsible for the personal information of its UK customers. The UK arm of the company failed to take appropriate steps to ensure its American parent Equifax Inc, which was processing the data on its behalf, was protecting the information.
In a statement released at the time, Equifax confirmed approximately 100,000 Canadians were also affected too, with names, addresses, social insurance numbers (SIN) and, in limited cases, credit card numbers among the personal information potentially accessed.
Equifax said that the breach occurred in mid-May 2017, but that it only discovered intruders had compromised its systems nearly two months later. For reasons that remain unclear, it took yet another month for the company to publicly disclose the breach.
Bloomberg has reported that it was actually the second time the company had been breached in 2017. The prior incident occurred in March according to Bloomberg's sources, with one saying it involved the same intruders as the subsequent hack.
Equifax claimed the two incidents were unrelated, but the company certainly knew it was being targeted in spring 2017.
That timeline will ulimately prove important, given three of the company's executives sold almost $1.8 million US in shares in the days after the July 29 discovery that the company had been breached. Equifax has denied the executives knew of the breach when they sold their shares, although legal action continues
Information Commissioners Office: Global News:
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