Tag: equifax hack

Security Standards For Financial Information

A long time ago, processors of credit card information didn’t have any standards. And they’d lose your data. People didn’t like that, and some type of regulation had to be put on the industry. The credit card processors got together and formed an initiative to form their own regulations – PCI. They were a lot more concerned with the regulation’s impact on profitability than government regulations would have been. The PCI standards were fairly effective.

And now one of the credit bureaus has lost a huge amount of personal data – including social security numbers and account numbers that I don’t get why were stored in anything other than a one-way hash in the first place. But the bigger question is how are these credit bureaus able to operate with standards that are less strict than the industry-association generated PCI standards? My guess is that there will be a credit bureau industry association writing security standards in the next week or so. If there isn’t an industry association forming to ensure my social security number and account numbers aren’t stored in clear text on web-accessible servers at credit bureaus … I should hope the government would intervene and mandate a certain level of security.

Equifax Hack

First of all, saying half the population of the United States has had their personal information stolen might be accurate, but it’s the good marketing spin. 2016 numbers had 249,485,228 adults in the United States. That’s 57% of people over 18 who have had their personal data stolen. Now there are people with no credit history. It’s a bit of a thing when you first want to rent a flat or get a credit card … you have no credit history, and can’t get credit until you have one. Last I read, it was something like 14% of adults who have no credit record — meaning Equifax gave up information on 66% of the credit-having population.

Leaving aside the marketing spin on numbers, though, why the hell is a credit bureau storing my personal information in a retrievable format instead of a one-way hash? Performance, I assume … so I guess my question really is why were a couple of clock cycles considered more important than the security of my data? Some of the data is probably maintained in clear text because they use heuristic matching to link incoming data to entities. I’m guessing my info comes in with a name, address, creditor name, and account number. And they’ve got to be able to match up the thirty different iterations of my address to ingest the data. But there’s no reason for the account number to be stored unhashed – store the last two or three digits in a new column for display (Your XYZ account ending in ###). And there’s sure as hell no reason for the SSN to be stored unhashed – even if they’d have to store the full one hashed and the last four in another hash because some data doesn’t come in with full SSNs.