The Male Hysteric

Yesterday Adrian Sanabria posted a twitter thread about the recent Equifax breach’s House Oversight Report, see here, unroll here, directly to the House Oversight Report here. Considering 2018 has been the longest year on record, I’ll forgive you if you managed to forget about this breach. This is the one back in late 2017 where Equifax managed to allow personally identifiable information of over half the adults in the United States be compromised. I remember saying to a friend that at this point it would be easier to just give everyone a new social security number, it was that bad — and I was only half-joking

Anyway. This breach was allowed to go on for an astonishing 76 days due to a lack of leadership and general incompetence and negligence at Equifax. Right before seeing the report, I’d finished watching the first season of Mr. Robot. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Robot, it’s a TV series where some hackers take down a large conglomerate from the inside because of the conglomerate’s unethical practices. Looking at the findings of the Equifax breach, what happened here is pretty much the opposite of the plot of Mr. Robot. Consider that, in Mr. Robot:

1. The security of the major conglomerate is actually competent and only manages to be taken down by internal malicious actors.
2. The hackers do not aim to victimize the ‘little guy’, AKA you, the normal viewer and consumer.
3. The organization is actually harmed by being breached.

( That last bit is the important bit. )