State and federal authorities are proposing tougher regulations against Equifax and the entire credit monitoring industry after the company announced that personal information like Social Security numbers of about 143 million Americans was exposed. The Washington Post has the story, here.
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The New York Times reports that "[l]obbyists and Republican lawmakers are gearing up for battle over a new U.S. regulation that is likely to dent profits in the $6 billion short-term, high-interest "payday" loan industry. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is expected in coming days to release a long-anticipated rule curbing payday lending, now […]
As explained in this detailed press release, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey today filed the nation’s first enforcement action against Equifax alleging that the company failed to protect the personal information of almost three million Massachusetts residents. Healey claims that “that Equifax knew about the vulnerabilities in its system for months, but utterly failed to keep the […]
This Wall Street Journal report gives more details on how the Equifax hack happened — more for me, at least. The report also includes this statement suggesting that Equifax's security is not so great: Alex Holden, chief information security officer of identity-theft monitoring company Hold Security LLC, says Equifax has long been considered a target for identity […]
Just two days before Equifax made public the massive hack of sensitive information of 143 million Americans — which Equifax kept secret for many weeks — U.S PIRG's Ed Mierzwinski posted this piece criticizing the three credit reporting agencies for their incompetence and congressional republicans for seeking to deregulate the industry. Here's an excerpt: What would you do […]
That's the first topic of this Consumerist article by Kate Cox. The article explains that Equifax had been given a fix for the computer vulnerability that the led to the hack, and Equifax had it well in advance of the breach. But the fix was not used at least in part because installing the fix was "labor intensive […]
Over at Credit Slips, law prof Adam Levitin has written Equifax: A Call for Public Utility Regulation of Consumer Reporting Agencies. It's a comprehensive and interesting post, and it's worth reading the whole thing. He starts by explaining the hacking of Equifax in plain terms — what it was (for instance, how it is different from […]
Can a company designing a driverless car simulate "the little nods and go-ahead half-waves that keep people from getting into crashes"? That's a topic of this article by Michael Laris.
This article by Gabrielle Hernandez explains that Chatbot company DoNotPay released a set of chatbots that can help consumers sue Equifax for negligence. Users provide their name and address to the bot, and it feeds the information into a state-designated form users can then print and file directly with the court. DoNotPay’s Equifax bots were first […]
Read about it in this article by Kevin McCoy. An excerpt: Filed in 14 states and the District of Columbia, the federal lawsuits target either Equifax or the company's Equifax Information Services subsidiary. The legal complaints cite a range of legal claims, including alleged security negligence by Equifax, the delay in alerting the public and concerns about the free credit monitoring […]