Kaspersky vigorously denied the claims and said the contractor caused the leak by running Kasperksy on a home machine that contained weaponized malware. The rules had not yet come into effect when they were dumped, but they would have required opt-in permission from broadband customers before ISPs could use their personal information and browsing habits for marketing or analytics purposes. In late March, Congress decided to remove the privacy rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission in 2016. Despite the devastating hack Equifax still won an anti-fraud contract from the Internal Revenue Service, though it was later suspended.
A failure to install current security patches on its network opened the door to the attack, the company said. The hackers struck in the spring, seizing 143 million Social Security numbers-that’s more than half of the U.S.
Equifax is one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies in the United States. “Jaw-dropping” does not begin to describe the Equifax breach, which came to light in September. Then in April the Shadow Brokers-an anonymous group of hackers that first came to notoriety in 2016-released a trove of attack tools linked to the National Security Agency.īoth releases would have significant impacts on computer device security.