Criminals had access to 55,000 IDs in Equifax hack

Criminals had access to 55,000 identity documents, such as passports and driver’s licenses, in the hack of credit rating agency Equifax. Equifax has announced this at the request of the US government.

These include 38,000 driver’s licenses, 12,000 cards with a “social security number” or “taxpayer ID” on them, 3,200 passports and 3,000 other IDs, such as military ID cards, Equifax reports in an 8-K Form for the US government that The Register mocked.

This concerns a relatively low number of identity documents to which the criminals had access. In total, the criminals were able to access data from 146.5 million people in the Equifax database, mostly Americans. Of these, 99 million contained address details, 20.3 million with a telephone number and 17.6 million with their driver’s license number. The criminals also stole credit card information from 209,000 people, including the number and the date it expires.

In May 2017, a major hack on Equifax took place. The criminals entered through a leak in Apache Struts that had been known for months. The vulnerability, with attribute CVE-2017-5638, allows remote code execution via a file upload with the Jakarta Multipart parser. According to security company Qualys, it is possible to take over a complete system in this way. Talos notes that attacks of different levels occur. For example, there are variants that only check whether a system is vulnerable and other variants that disable firewalls and then bring malware into the system.

As a result of the hack, the director decided to resign from his position at the end of September. The chief security officer and the chief information officer had already left earlier. Information about the hack was released in September last year.