Robert Siciliano breaks down the 2017 Equifax breach that exposed 143 million Americans' data. Three executives sold nearly $2 million in stock before disclosing it. Siciliano recommends freezing your credit with the major bureaus to block identity theft.
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There's new developments in that massive hacking attack of Equifax. Equifax is reportedly now blaming a flaw in its vendor software for a data breach that has affected 143 million Americans. This unfolding after 3 top executives at the credit reporting company sold nearly $2 million worth of stock. This is before they announced this data breach to the public. Joining me now, Robert Siciliano, CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com. Robert, uh, before we get Before we get into these guys selling the stock and all of that, let's talk about how this happens at a firm that is— that we have given the American public $143 million, our Social Security number, our addresses, our driver's license information. We've given them this information. How do they allow it to be taken like this?
Yeah, this is turning into a dumpster fire. The fact that they are responsible for protecting identities and in fact selling identity theft protection, and now this is probably the single largest breach of Social Security numbers ever, and now they're giving away their identity theft protection for free with the option to buy it over time. It's really ugly and should have never happened.
Well, apparently a year ago there was a firm, MSCI, that said— they put out a report saying, hey, Uh, there's some— there's some problems here with this company. Uh, in fact, data from a large company with 430,000 employees, uh, they lost some of their tax information, some of their salary information. They sort of sounded the alarm. And yet the criticism of this company, which is a multi-billion dollar company, is that they overpaid executives, uh, they spent lavishly on themselves, and they did not invest in the adequate structure to keep our information safe. Is that something that you see often with respect to these companies?
You know, officers at these companies that, um, essentially living high on the hog, that face major breaches such as this, often find themselves unemployed when things like this happen. Because once you put the microscope on them, you start to see exactly what the corporate culture is and how flawed things are internally. Stuff like this should not happen in this day and age. There are so many There are many respectable vendors out there providing solutions to make sure that networks are not breached, and by following basic protocol should prevent most data breaches at this point.
Robert, how do we the consumer know which companies are actually doing the quote-unquote right thing with our information? Is there any way to know?
So ultimately, there really isn't, I'm sorry to say. Consumers cannot trust government. They cannot trust corporations to solely protect their information. They really are— it really is up to themselves to make sure that their data is properly protected, even though it's out of their hands.
Right.
But there are basic things that you can and should do to make sure that this doesn't happen to you. The really— the best thing that consumers can do right now is to get what's called a credit freeze. And a credit freeze locks down your credit report and your Social Security number so that nobody can open up new lines lines of credit without your authorization. Simply go to all 3 major credit bureaus, search the term credit freeze in their search bar, and you'll go to the page where you begin to administrate.
That is great, great information for us, and we really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
