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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 09 2017, @09:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the shit-rolls-downhill dept.

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666_

In a continued effort to pass on any responsibility for the largest data breach in American history, Equifax's recently departed CEO is blaming it all on a single person who failed to deploy a patch.

Hackers exposed the Social Security numbers, drivers licenses and other sensitive info of 143 million Americans earlier this summer by exploiting a vulnerability in Apache's Struts software, according to testimony heard today from former CEO Richard Smith. However, a patch for that vulnerability had been available for months before the breach occurred.

Now several top Equifax execs are being taken to task for failing to protect the information of millions of U.S. citizens. In a live stream before the Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce committee, Smith testified the Struts vulnerability had been discussed when it was first announced by CERT on March 8th.

Smith said when he started with Equifax 12 years ago there was no one in cybersecurity. The company has poured a quarter of a billion dollars into cybersecurity in the last three years and today boasts a 225 person team.

However, Smith had an interesting explainer for how this easy fix slipped by 225 people's notice — one person didn't do their job.

"The human error was that the individual who's responsible for communicating in the organization to apply the patch, did not," Smith, who did not name this individual, told the committee.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/03/former-equifax-ceo-says-breach-boiled-down-to-one-person-not-doing-their-job/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @12:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09 2017, @12:38PM (#579252)

    I can't remember what the first story was, but the level of 'not very good' was about the same.
    The last story was 'don't worry, we are going to do an internal investigation and get to the bottom of this'.
    Today's story is 'we found the single guy responsible for this'.

    The series of stories might be laughable if they were not trying to explain a serious problem.

    If they did their job as well as they do their stories, then perhaps they are actually showing the problem.
    Simple incompetence.