2.4 Million More Americans Exposed in Data Breach Says Equifax

If you thought that ripples and dangers from the Equifax breach in September 2017 have passed, think again. Yesterday, Darcy noticed she was getting junk (snail) mail for people who no longer lived at her address. She told me she thought more data had been exposed in the Equifax breach that was announced last September. Apparently, Equifax, trying to mitigate the damage, didn’t report all the names of those who had sensitive data stolen from them. Well, it was only 2.4 million people. Only?  As pointed out in the article below from Clark Howard, 2.4 million people is greater than the population of Rhode Island & New Hampshire combined.

Below is a portion of the article from Clark Howard:

Equifax says 2.4 million more Americans exposed in data breach

The new revelations cast doubt on whether the public will ever known the true extent of the massive breach, which was disclosed by the Atlanta-based company on September 7, 2017. California Senator Elizabeth Warren, who recently released a report on Equifax called “Bad Credit,” echoed those sentiments in a recent interview, saying that the company was actually still profiting off the hack.

“The problem is there’s no real penalty for them,” Warren told Marketplace.org. “You know, it’s not like consumers can say, ‘Well, that’s it. I’m never going to do business with Equifax again.’ That’s not how it works with credit-reporting agencies. In fact, Equifax may actually make money off this breach because it sells all these credit-protection devices, and even consumers who say, ‘Hey, I’m never doing business with Equifax again,’ well, good for you, but you go buy credit protection from someone else, they very well may be using Equifax to do the back office part. So Equifax is still making money off their own breach.”

Just last month, we reported that the hack was much worse than we thought based on new information that in addition to Social Security numbers, the criminals made off with the names of the issuing states for some driver’s licenses, credit card expiration dates as well as tax identification numbers, email addresses and phone numbers.

The latest disclosure means that as many as 148 million consumers have been exposed to identity fraud in the cybersecurity incident. And if you don’t think an additional 2.4 million people make a difference, that’s the size of the populations of New Hampshire and Rhode Island combined.

For more about this latest revelation, please read the entire Clark Howard article here.