Everyone American should be scared shitless at this incompetence. It's going to cost everyone thousands of dollars over their lives for credit fraud protection. Just another expense to add.
What would an accurate "what if" scenario like this look like?
Overall, many thousands of folks would have their home plans/vacation/card-flipping/whatever plans screwed up, some thousands would have a more severe financial problem, the banks would muddle through, "we'd" rebuild the financial-surveillance system over again, and it would probably be less stupid in some ways at the cost of being more uniformly intrusive.
The Target breach was the thing that finally catalyzed the move from magstripe ccs to EMV ccs. I think we are currently on the precipice of the point when we need to move towards a second factor of authentication ("something you have" or "something you are" in addition to the lots of "something you know" that the current credit bureau system uses).
People can complain all they want about credit, but the reality is that it exists as a financial service because loaning things with interest is probably older than agriculture in human society. We've just gotten very good at risk assessment, and this going public would ruin our ability to assess risk for years.
Honestly, the credit industry ought to be the ones raging against Equifax's fuck up. If only all the other credit bureaus weren't on eggshells hoping they're not next.
So far, I have had three phones signed up in my name (essentially stolen from the suppliers), can't easily get a mortgage because I own my own company, somehow making me riskier than people who earn half my income, and in the past had my credit card limit extended to £10,000 without asking when I was almost broke.
To me that doesn't sound like they're good at assessing risk at all, they're just blindly following extremely simple algos instead of knowing their customers.
The records wouldn't be rendered meaningless any way, the fundamental of a credit report is how much debt you already have and if you ever miss payments or have judgements against you. Then a lender compares that to your income.
The only change would be that you need to present photo ID in person to open new credit lines... which doesn't seem that unreasonable really.
The film ended that way. The novel had a different, more Palahniuk-ish ending. Spoil it for yourself if you must at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(novel)
Offtopic I know, but quantitavie economics and bureaucracies were both borne out of agriculture; before that value was subjective.
With such a large percentage of our social security numbers being potentially outright public, financial institutions need to stop assuming that an account holder is legitimate because they provide an SSN. And it is in their best interests to do so, since they end up on the hook in most cases for fraudulent accounts (after putting you through an awful process to prove it isn't yours).
For example, rather than letting someone sign up for an account with the SSN as a verification of identity, new credit accounts could potentially be considered probationary (or just outright not created) until a one-time code is mailed to the credit holder's established home address (based on their existing credits and payment history) as confirmation that the real person with that SSN authorizes that transaction. While such a step would not be completely impossible to defeat, it would mitigate attackers on the other side of the globe opening fraudulent accounts.
In my mind, the Just thing to do would be for Equifax to offer ongoing fraud protection to all of their customers affected by this leak. (Gosh, that might be expensive!)