Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

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"Then the executives sold their stock a day before they announced the hack to the public."

Selling stock the day before the news makes these guys seem like absolute criminals, but (a) it's not what happened and (b) the soundbyte doesn't represent what is likely the case.

The reality:

- Breach happened between March - July 2017

- Breach detected July 29th (A Saturday)

- Executives sold stock August 1 (A Tuesday)

- Breach announced September 9th (5 weeks later)

From the company's own statement, which you can BET was vetted by a lot of attorneys:

"Equifax discovered the unauthorized access on July 29 of this year and acted immediately to stop the intrusion. The company promptly engaged a leading, independent cybersecurity firm that has been conducting a comprehensive forensic review to determine the scope of the intrusion, including the specific data impacted."

I would bet, dollars to donuts, this is just terrible timing optically for the executives.

What is much more likely reality is that they detect breaches on a regular basis, and until the forensic team came back with the bombshell - likely many weeks later - of the scope of the data loss, the executives were not even informed.

I'm reading a book now call "Liquidated: an Ethnography of Wall Street" by Karen Ho from Princeton. There is this incredible part at the beginning of the book where the Vice Presidents of Goldman Sachs are training the incoming group of Junior Analysts who have all just graduated MBA school, telling them how to treat the executives of the companies they are going to be analyzing.

They make them shout over and over "MANAGEMENT ALWAYS LIES, MANAGEMENT ALWAYS LIES, MANAGEMENT ALWAYS LIES".

That scene took place in the early 90's, and I can't imagine anyone thinks it's gotten better in regards to the ethics of top management, their understanding of technology, or their desire to participate in insider training.

Such a mantra may not be true, but it imbues analysts with a sense of skepticism. The analysts are the very people Goldman expects to detect lying management.

July 29 < August 1 < September 9

I don't see anything exonerating in the timeline you described. You are making assumptions here that could excuse the executives if they were true. These are nothing but assumptions though.

The sales were unplanned, meaning they weren't entered per the usual stock sale cycle. If that's not evidence enough of at least insider trading, coupled with your timeline, I don't know what is.

>What is much more likely reality is that they detect breaches on a regular basis, and until the forensic team came back with the bombshell - likely many weeks later - of the scope of the data loss, the executives were not even informed.

Your hypothesis is predicated on the fact that you trust their timeline, and make assumption that type of events could have occurred within each groups at Equifax on those days..

Brazenness is already in evidence: Equifax's management thinks offering one measly year of credit monitoring, which will inevitably lead to huge sales of such a service, is an adequate response. What makes you think they are not at least as brazen about their stock positions in Equifax?

> I would bet, dollars to donuts, this is just terrible timing optically for the executives.

Difficult to prove, but I too suspect it’s just bad timing.

Note that the three executives sold relatively small portions of stock: 13%, 9%, 4% of their respective personal holdings.

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