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Renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier has a story up on his blog On the Equifax Data Breach:
Last Thursday, Equifax reported a data breach that affects 143 million US customers, about 44% of the population. It's an extremely serious breach; hackers got access to full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers -- exactly the sort of information criminals can use to impersonate victims to banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, and other businesses vulnerable to fraud.
Many sites posted guides to protecting yourself now that it's happened. But if you want to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, your only solution is government regulation (as unlikely as that may be at the moment).
The market can't fix this. Markets work because buyers choose between sellers, and sellers compete for buyers. In case you didn't notice, you're not Equifax's customer. You're its product.
This happened because your personal information is valuable, and Equifax is in the business of selling it. The company is much more than a credit reporting agency. It's a data broker. It collects information about all of us, analyzes it all, and then sells those insights.
Its customers are people and organizations who want to buy information: banks looking to lend you money, landlords deciding whether to rent you an apartment, employers deciding whether to hire you, companies trying to figure out whether you'd be a profitable customer -- everyone who wants to sell you something, even governments.
It's not just Equifax. It might be one of the biggest, but there are 2,500 to 4,000 other data brokers that are collecting, storing, and selling information about you -- almost all of them companies you've never heard of and have no business relationship with.
Surveillance capitalism fuels the Internet, and sometimes it seems that everyone is spying on you. You're secretly tracked on pretty much every commercial website you visit.
Bruce continues with observations about the data gathering activities of such on-line behemoths as Google and Facebook, as well as companies as mundane as your cell phone provider. Sadly, massive data breaches such as what happened at Target, Home Depot, and Yahoo! gathered media attention for a while, but after a matter of time faded from public awareness and concern.
He suggests the only solution is government regulation. Maybe. But that also runs up against the problem of regulatory capture.
What, if anything, can be done? Mandate a minimum payment of, say, $100.00 to each person who had information disclosed? That would certainly boost a company's willingness to implement security best-practices.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Friday September 15 2017, @07:07AM (3 children)
Serious question, what can the individual really do to protect their credit now?
The TV is parroting that everyone should freeze their credit. Note that this involves locking credit at each of the three credit reporting companies, from then on getting loans or employer credit checks involves unlocking and re-locking credit, and that this involves giving money to each of these credit reporting companies. It seems as if there might be some other downsides too.
With everyones personal data out there now, logically this seems like it will have to become the the new standard operating procedure?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @09:53AM
Maybe the new standard operating procedure will be to have your DNA sampled for identity?
If someone accepts a fake identity without proper checks, then how should that be the problem of the person who's identity is impersonated? The problem should be with the person that accepts fake identity without proper checks. Lending money to a fake identity should require compensation for the victim of identity theft from the lender that did not do their job.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday September 15 2017, @12:01PM
Yeah and they pay the TV a lot of money for advertising. Its hard to believe the TV might provide bad advice, but it does happen.
My guess short to medium term is the whole credit fraud thing will be just like telemarketers, an unavoidable waste of time.
A sign of cultural collapse is wasted time. We're used to it, look at health care middlemen and frankly every other middleman.
We'll have thieves doing that, soon enough. They'll be the only people really good at it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @08:26PM
I'm not affected by it (that I know of), but frankly, if I were (or am, because why should I trust their webpage), they can go fuck themselves. I'm not giving them money to "lock" or "unlock" anything. How the fuck do they even know it's me that's doing the locking and unlocking if the very information they would have used to check that I am who I claim I am is now in the wild?
It's not my responsibility to make these rich assholes take security and problem of authentication a wee bit more seriously. It's not my problem if tons of fraudsters can authenticate as me now. You know what? If it comes down to it, it's going to be collateral damage. Not tomorrow or next week. Give it years.
Then some fat cat assholes are going to have to stop going into eyes-glassed-over-mode whenever somebody says "public/private key" if they ever want to have this stranglehold on credit again.
Personally, I think it's great. It's about time this happened. It may be painful for the first ten thousand human cattle or so that suffer, but unless the system changes, it's finally coming down just like at the end of Fight Club.