{"id":2453,"date":"2018-09-05T10:24:39","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T10:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fbijohn.com\/index.php\/2018\/09\/05\/lessons-learned-on-the-1-year-anniversary-of-the-equifax-breach\/"},"modified":"2023-07-31T12:00:02","modified_gmt":"2023-07-31T12:00:02","slug":"lessons-learned-on-the-1-year-anniversary-of-the-equifax-breach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fbijohn.com\/lessons-learned-on-the-1-year-anniversary-of-the-equifax-breach\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons learned on the 1 year anniversary of the Equifax Breach"},"content":{"rendered":"

One year ago today, on September 7, 2017, Equifax announced its cybersecurity incident involving the private information of 143 million people.<\/p>\n

Unbelievably, the Equifax data breach event occurred between May and July 2017, yet Equifax waited six weeks before its public disclosure on September 7, 2017.<\/p>\n

But it gets worse, as one month later, Equifax announced that its data breach event included an additional 2.5 million individuals, and then in March 2018, Equifax found an additional 2.4 million people bringing the total number of affected individuals to nearly 148 million.<\/p>\n

The Equifax data breach event exposed Social Security numbers, Dates of Birth, addresses, and even driver\u2019s license numbers. This means that affected consumers will have their Social Security numbers and birth dates sold and traded on the \u201cdark web\u201d for the rest of their lives.<\/p>\n

So when Equifax offers 12 months or 24 months of \u201cfree\u201d credit bureau monitoring \u2013 it is essentially worthless as ID theft criminals typically sit on stolen information for 12 to 24 months before they begin to use it for fraudulent purposes.<\/p>\n

As we recognize the one-year anniversary of this historic September 7, 2017, public disclosure of the Equifax data breach event, I have listed below some lessons learned for consumers:<\/p>\n