Equifaxâ€™s problems just keep getting worse.

Not long ago, the company suffered a major data breach that ultimately resulted in the CEO stepping down and a painful congressional grilling. Initial estimates placed the number of impacted users at some 143 million, but as the investigation has continued, it turns out that the numbers are even higher than initially feared. Based on the forensic teamâ€™s final report, as many as 145.5 million users were impacted.

In our modern society, there are many who would argue that your credit score is as important, if not more important than your social security number. To arrive at your score, the â€œBig Threeâ€� credit reporting agencies necessarily have to collect a large amount of sensitive information about people, so when they suffer from a breach, itâ€™s bad, and in Equifaxâ€™s case, it just keeps getting worse.

Based on the latest information, the compromised data included names, social security numbers, birthdays, and addresses. If that wasnâ€™t bad enough, some 200,000 customers saw their credit card information exposed, along with an unknown number of electronic documents containing PII.


To put these numbers in full context, Equifax maintains files on more than 800 million people around the world, along with more than 90 million businesses, so the breach, while catastrophic in size, wasnâ€™t nearly as bad as it could have been.

Thatâ€™s small consolation to the millions who have been impacted, but itâ€™s important to understand that as bad as the breach was, it was quite far from the worst case scenario.



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