How 143 million users’ data was stolen from Equifax
We have more than once said how a well-known brand name doesn’t mean 100% reliability. This is exactly what happened with Equifax, a top three credit score company in the US. In 2017 it turned out personal data of at least 143 million clients has been breached.
Last May to steal the data the perpetrators used a vulnerability in an Equifax platform component for creating web applications.
Over the period of three months their presence went unnoticed, leaving the hackers with access to clients’ personal data, including names, birth dates, addresses, social security numbers and other information enough to conduct identity theft. 209 thousand documents also contained bank account information. The breach affected users from the US, UK and Canada.
Equifax has officially admitted the incident, however, the company never explained why two months wasn’t enough to update the vulnerable software, considering the code error in the platform (Apache Struts) was known as early as March 2017.
At the time of writing the issue has been resolved despite the fact that the Equifax incident is considered one of the worst data breaches due to the nature of the data collected.
“This is clearly a disappointing event for our company, and one that strikes at the heart of who we are and what we do,” Equifax CEO has commented.
Equifax is not the only well-known company to have suffered from data theft, in the past similar screw-ups have happened to Yahoo.
The leak of 500 million user accounts and the national scandal over data theft from over 200 million US voters has yet again proven that centralized data storage is unsafe.
This is the reason Casper API continues developing a system where any data of any company will be secure.
We don’t store our clients’ data in one place, we use our providers’ storage capacities to store multiple copies of data that can be spread across the entire globe.
Casper API is using smart contracts to simplify the interaction between clients and providers; a P2P architecture to increase system reliability; a zk-SNARK cryptographical method that ensures confidentiality when working with data. All the network participants are linked together without the use of larger network nodes such as servers which makes the entire network much more resistant to DDoS attacks. Storing multiple copies with different network participants allows downloading data even if one of the network participants goes offline.
Decentralization is the future, but some companies and even governments are yet to fully understand this. In its turn, Casper API allows storing any data as soon as today.
In a safe and reliable manner.
