The Equifax Data Breach PDF

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Written Assignment Unit 1: The Equifax Data Breach - University of the People PHIL 1404 Ethics and Social Responsibility Cynthia Donnelly, Instructor June 19, 2021

Written Assignment Unit 1– The Equifax Data Breach

Introduction Equifax is one of three major American credit reporting agencies along with Experian and TransUnion. In mid-May 2017 to July, hackers hacked the company’s servers and accessed the personal information of about half of Americans. (Byars & Stanberry, 2019). They accessed personal information such as Names, Social Security Numbers, Birth Dates and Addresses. Despite knowing, the company did not disclose the hack to the public until September. I will be discussing this incident in this paper and below are the answers: 1. In this case there are couple of instances with issues of legal compliance. According to electronic privacy information center “The vulnerability that caused the breach was vulnerability Apache Struts CVE-2017-5638. Apache Struts is a popular framework for creating Java Web applications maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. The Foundation issued a statement announcing the vulnerability and released a patch on March 7, 2017.”( Electronic Privacy Information Center, 2017). We know that the breach happened from mid-May to July but Apache Software Foundation had released the patch earlier in March. This breach could have been avoided by Equifax but they neglected to address the vulnerability on time and their negligence in protecting personal information of the people was a legal compliance issue. Another element with legal compliance issue was the violation of insider trading rules by the executives of the company. They sold $2 millions of company stock before notifying the public of the company's hack (Byars & Stanberry, 2019). An element that was legal but unethical was the resignation of company’s CEO, Chief information officer and Chief of security. They resigned and left the company without acting responsible and responsive to the investors and people.

2. The Equifax breach definitely impacted the company’s position negatively compared to other competitors. As mentioned in the textbook “The company’s shares fell nearly 14 percent after the announcement.”( Byars, S. M., & Stanberry, K. , 2019). However Equifax claimed that it hasn’t lost any big clients since data breach and but the breach was definitely a reputation crisis for the company. In my opinion this incident will not have a big impact in company’s future success if the executives try their best to rebuild the trust. In 2020, Equifax reported third-quarter revenue of $1,068.3 million, a 22% increase from 2019 (Equifax, 2020) and this shows that they have regained the trust and have successfully passed that crisis.

3. I believe that Equifax executives didn’t act professionally at the beginning of the crisis but offering free credit monitoring and identity-theft protection for clients was a good start to compensate the clients and it was one of the reasons the company was able to rebuild the trust within the clients and investors.

Conclusion Equifax breach was a huge crisis that affected half of Americans but Equifax did not handle the crisis properly. Executers of the company showed a lot of unethical and illegal behavior. Their behavior was very selfish and unprofessional. Despite the crisis and challenges the company faced, it recovered very well and they have been profiting annually since then.

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References

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Byars, S. M., & Stanberry, K. (2019). Business ethics. OpenStax College and Rice University. Retrieved from: https://opentextbc.ca/businessethicsopenstax/

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Consumer Information. (2019). The Equifax data breach: What to do. Retrieved from https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2017/09/equifax-data-breach-what-do

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Electronic Privacy Information Center. (2017). EPIC - Equifax data breach. Retrieved from https://epic.org/privacy/data-breach/equifax/

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Equifax. (2020). Equifax releases third quarter 2020 results. Retrieved from https://investor.equifax.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2020/10-21-2020-

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- Wikipedia. (2021). Equifax. Retrieved from - https://en.wikipedia.or g/wiki/Equifax#:~:text =Equifax%20Inc.%20is %20an %20American,the - %20%22Big%20Three %22) - Consumer Information. (2019). The Equifax data breach: What to do. Retrieved from

- https://www.consumer. ftc.gov/blog/2017/09/e quifax-data-breachwhat-d...