Consequences Of And Lessons Learned From The Equifax Data Breach

The Equifax data breach has and will have significant long-term ramifications for data security practices and personal privacy. Understanding how the Equifax data breach occurred and the type of data compromised is crucial to understanding the consequences of this breach.

Reason for the Data Breach

Based upon available information, it appears that the hackers were able to breach Equifax's security due to an application vulnerability that was running on its server. Specifically, there was a vulnerability with Apache Struts 2. Apache Struts 2 is an open-source web application framework for developing Java EE web applications. A patch for the application was available, which would have prevented the breach, but the patch was not installed.