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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's why I bought Equifax call options a little bit after the breach was announced. Made good money on those options, and it pisses me off. It pisses me off that after an event that should bankrupt a company such as Equifax, I lay hard-earned on the table knowing that I have an extremely good chance of a healthy ROI simply because of vested interests and status quo.

Like other political hot topics, this is one of those things that causes me to ask, "okay, then, how bad does it have to get before populist outrage brings about change?" Something worse happens, and this is the time, right? Nope. And so on from one event to the next.

OTOH, in this case maybe the invalidation of vast amounts of data will alone bring about changes out of necessity. There will probably be a rough patch of lawsuits, debate, and perhaps a new law or two, but perhaps it will eventually shake out something better.

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> how bad does it have to get before populist outrage brings about change?

We had a bill in the New York State Senate after the Equifax breach [1]. It was dead on arrival. Practically nobody called in to offer support. It was apparent that nobody's political career would be made nor broken by this bill. When it died, there was no press; nobody noticed nor cared.

[1] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2017/s1104/amendm...

I'm guessing most people didn't know about it to offer support? Seems like a failure of the press if they didn't monitor bills and bring awareness...

That said, I'm not sure how much of a fix timely disclosure is. Maybe people thought it wouldn't go even remotely far enough to help a significant number of people and hence wouldn't be worth it. (I could even see it being harmful if it makes it less likely to get more serious legislation passed.)

> I'm guessing most people didn't know about it to offer support?

A bit of this, a bit of that. I was excited about the bill and offered to help. When it came to selling it, however, people were more animated by Trump, affordable housing and the MTA. Despite our obsession with privacy on Hacker News, it hasn't been properly sold to the public.

> I'm not sure how much of a fix timely disclosure is

It was to allow the Attorney General to investigate these crimes. Right now, there is no disclosure requirement. Unless the company reports its breach and co-operates with state Attorneys General, they basically can't be held accountable at the state level. So, naturally, they refuse to co-operate.

Is it the job of the press to notify state senators of bills on their own floor? I don’t want to undermine the value of public awareness and activism, but I think blaming this one on the press is a stretch.

Partisanship. There are no electoral consequences to moving on. So long as corporate interests have us focused on voting eligibility and who can have sex with whom, and whether there can be an abortion afterwards, no one is gonna vote based on this.

As far as anyone can tell, the data from the breach hasn't been used yet. When that happens, it'll probably be the largest identify theft fraud ever, and if it's traced to Equifax, we may see an "adjustment".

I'm still betting (small) on that happening.

Not a chance. There have been too many other breaches, I don't see how there would be any way to tie a particular instance of potential identity theft back to a particular breach. And besides, how many more breaches will the be in the next 6 months? 12 months? Take a look at this: https://www.identityforce.com/blog/2017-data-breaches. That was last year...you think 2018 will be any better?

There is no way to trace identity fraud directly to Equifax, especially since there are so many data breaches that this becomes just another one.

I believe people have a very rational reason not to support this because of the extremely dangerous slippery slope precedent it would cause. This would dramatically increase costs on consumers (they will have to pay for the risk of total anhilation of a company by being online), hamper innovation, create incentives for rogue nations to cripple our legal system by targeting large companies and watching them get fed to the American public. Who wants that?

Consumers already pay a huge cost. They just don't pay it up front -- they pay it later after the breach. And worse, the people who pay in many cases are people who were victims of the breached entity, but not customers of it (see Equifax, whose customers are other businesses, not the people whose data they gathered).

Pricing this into the service from the beginning might well cause disruption to a number of industries, but that isn't automatically a bad thing. And "innovation" that consists of involuntarily inflicting risk and suffering and ruin on third parties is perhaps not the kind of "innovation" we need -- one might just as easily argue that laws against involuntary human medical experimentation "hamper innovation".

I'm guessing you got in on BP too?

Missed BP, but I did grab some United at the right time.

> an event that should bankrupt a company such as Equifax

That's a ludicrous thought. They were the victims of a crime, not the criminals. Should Target have been bankrupted? Or Home Depot?

That's a ludicrous thought. They were the victims of a crime, not the criminals.

This is in no way similar to Target or HD, other than data were taken. The whole system upon which Equifax was built relied on a semi-secret number that cannot be changed. Those numbers, or at least the majority of them, are out in the open. There was a certain degree of trust that the person sitting across from you at the auto dealer finance desk was who they say they were, and that the report stating that they're good for a loan was accurate. That was not 100% true for a number of years, and it's potentially wildly inaccurate now.

IOW, Equifax's sloppy work resulted in a broken system from where I sit. If you're thinking I'm wishing bankruptcy upon Equifax, well, I didn't write that, sorry. But if the shaky foundation upon which your business model rests collapses, I would expect severe financial penalties. But, hell, Moody's is still in business.

> The whole system upon which Equifax was built

You mean "which the credit industry was built"...not Equifax. Equifax is just one of the big 3 CRAs. Singling out Equifax in this context is taking a very narrow view.

Equifax is more than just a company in this business. It is part of cartel with just two other participants. It is not completely inaccurate to single out Equifax as a controller of this industry.

I don’t disagree. However, when I’m buying call options for a particular incident, I’m picking Equifax in this case, which was the context, and hence the singling out of one company amongst the three.

The Target and HD breaches were of customer data. You can choose not to shop at those stores and be safe. You can't keep Equifax from handling your data without disconnecting from society.

Not mention I just saw yet another commercial where Equifax was selling a service to protect your data "on the dark web". Which they allowed go there. It's like a bank losing your money and then for a fee offering to keep other people from using it.

Are you sure that wasn't Experian? I can't find anything from Equifax advertising that service.

Equifax is government-mandated extortion.

I bought EFX after the incident and made a bundle on it too, but I don't share your outrage.

Does the breach call for some punitive response? Definitely. Does it justify destroying a $14B company? No. That's an overly emotional, witch-hunting type of response.

HN of all places should be sympathetic to what happened to Equifax; they neglected to update a framework which had a vulnerability granting full remote code execution. That's game over from an info sec standpoint, and how many developers here can state, with 100% confidence, that every library and every framework and piece of application code in their own work is totally bulletproof and will never fall victim to something similar?

The breach should be used by everyone as a lesson, and as I stated earlier Equifax should receive some punitive action (arguably already delivered by the hit to their stock price and the public floggings from the congressional hearings). But saying that Equifax should be bankrupted by it, or that the executives or developers should be thrown in jail? Be careful what you wish for. Today Equifax, tomorrow you.

I think the key part of the outrage against Equifax, and part of why it is more outrageous than most breaches, is not only was customer data revealed, but also data about people who want nothing to do with Equifax. There is no action victims could have taken to avoid this breach.

In most serious breaches, there is a certain amount of "well, you have to be careful who you give your information to..." even though it's not the victims fault. This factor is not present in the Equifax situation. Equifax is allowed to hold and market a product based on data of individuals who never gave consent, but has no responsibility to protect that data or repercussions when they fail.

Arguably this breach has put the final nail in the coffin for using SSN's as secure identifiers. Granted, it was a horrible and mostly-already-broken system to begin with. But I think that this flawed system was still worth in excess of $14B - and Equifax's negligence effectively destroyed that value. I agree bankrupting Equifax would be heavy-handed, but it would be nice to at least see some punitive action that would discourage such negligence in the future and provide an economic disincentive to possessing vast quantities of private data.

I'm not an American, so I don't know. How much of Equifax's business and value was driven by credit checks and anything else having to do with SSNs? Because if the whole SSN system had a $14 billion value, which was then destroyed by Equifax's negligence, and Equifax had the majority of its business doing this stuff, wouldn't that make Equifax bankrupt? So either Equifax makes a lot of money doing other stuff, or the $14 billion in value wasn't destroyed by Equifax's negligence. I imagine it's the latter, that SSN is still being used for everything because oil tankers can't change their momentum so quickly. If you meant that SSNs can safely be predicted to be not used for identification a decade or two from now, who's to say this was the catalyst? Any system eventually gets revamped, even government systems, especially if they were already broken in the first place. There are many examples worldwide of ID systems and laws changing all the time. In fact, I just read that majority of states are supposed to require Americans to use a passport for flying now. The Real ID Act? Just a bunch of states were too slow to get it done, so they've been given an extension, but even in the US, there's work being done to revamp identification in some areas. I'm not saying that it's good or bad, I'm saying that it seems to happen eventually. Why wouldn't SSN also change up even if Equifax never happened?

What hit to their stock price? It’s the same price it was a year ago.

We’ve all made computer mistakes like this, but the stakes are different. If I forget to update a framework and as a result a bunch of cat pictures leak, that’s not a big deal. If I do the exact same thing and leak important private info with financial consequences for nearly every American, that’s a much bigger deal. They data they collected needed to be stored in a bulletproof fashion. You could argue that this is impossible, but that just means the data should not have been collected at all.

The calls to destroy the company seem pretty reasonable to me. This is a classic case of an externality. Equifax cost a shitload of people a bunch of money, and they’re bearing very little of the cost. Arguably they’re actually profiting from it by selling fraud protection services.

The only question to me is: just how much did they cost the American people? Whatever it is, they should bear the entire cost. And I bet that cost is more than the company is worth.

GP implies that EFX was purchased sometime after the fall and before the present day, which would have yielded an apparent profit.

Right, but they also said that they've already been punished by the hit to their stock price, which doesn't look like it's the case at all.

We're deep enough in that I don't know who the parent of who anymore, but to be clear I bought in-the-money calls at around $93 (the hit to their stock price), and sold the contracts when it hit around $111 (seemed to have leveled off).

But you're probably not talking about me, as I'm the one pissed off that those calls made money, not thinking they've been punished. It should have hit $93 and stayed there.

Heh! To clarify, my bit about the stock price being the same as a year ago is in reference to cloakandswagger stating "Equifax should receive some punitive action (arguably already delivered by the hit to their stock price and the public floggings from the congressional hearings)."

This logic makes no sense to me. You have a company that stores, without consent, highly personal data for almost every American. There was an implied responsibility to protect that information. For such a company, security should be pretty high on the priority list. All of the following is negligence:

1) Store all this information, unencrypted

2) They were told of the vulnerability in March and had 2 months to update the software.

3) Afterwards, set up a broken website with a DV certificate to accept SSN numbers.

4) The website, even though was a vulnerability disclosure, tried to _sell_ an Equifax identity monitoring package.

5) Redirect your own customers to a phishing website set up by a white hat hacker

6) Allow employees to have usernames/pws like 'admin/admin' on edge servers

The circumstances that led to the vulnerability, and the actions that Equifax took afterwards absolutely warrant outrage. And this is not even taking into account the original point - this is a pattern of incompetence and failure - but to add to the fire, Equifax was a company that was tasked with storing highly sensitive personal data for millions of Americans and did not take the appropriate security steps to do so; in fact, they ignored even the most basic security measures. They should have had at least bank-level security with such a responsibility. There is no excuse.

This shows how the USA is completely hostile to its own people: not only nothing has been done to punish Equifax, but the government will block any move to regulate the activity of this incompetent and borderline criminal company.

Equifax should not exist because the credit system causes so much harm spread out over many individuals. That problem existed before the breach, and it is just as much a problem with Equifax's competitors as with Equifax. The breach only serves to highlight what malignant parasites the credit agencies are.

This is a false dichotomy. Equifax was extremely negligent. I don't have to be 100% perfect myself to be outraged by that.

Right now it's "Today you, never Equifax." Too-big-to-fail institutions do fail do fulfill their obligations, and if they're not substantially gutted and rebuilt they will only fail to fulfill obligations to an even worse degree.

"It's ok for a long-haul bus driver to occasionally drive while sleepy, because people on HN occasionally drive their cars while sleepy."

Their stock price was temporarily damaged, and they had to have an awkward hearing in front of congress - that seems light when compared to their negligence which handed over financial and personal information for most of the country to hackers unknown. On top of this, they delayed telling the public, they admitted they only encrypt "some" of their data at rest, and a few of their executives sold stock between the time the company knew about the attack and the public didn't.

Your argument is wise to consider the "let he who is without sin" perspective, but I don't find it that compelling. They had a hoard of valuable information which they carelessly stored and they paid essentially zero consequences. If I had to choose between this world, and the world where Equifax was just liquidated with the proceeds going to people affected, I'd prefer the latter. "Won't somebody think of the shareholders?" I have, but I've also contemplated the tens of millions harmed by their incompetence.

"HN of all places should be sympathetic to what happened to Equifax"

Why should I be sympathetic to them, especially after how they handled it? And especially given that they make loads of money off MY DATA, and want to turn around and have the gall to charge me to see it, to make sure it's accurate?

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