The Equifax Breach Is Even Worse Than We Thought

The company said an additional 2.4 million people were affected by last year's data breach.

Equifax revealed Thursday that 2.4 million additional people were affected by last year's massive data breach that had already impacted 145.5 million customers.

The credit reporting agency said the breach had exposed people's names and partial driver's license information, but "in the vast majority of cases, it did not include consumers' home addresses, or their respective driver's license states, dates of issuance, or expiration dates."

(It's not a bad idea to freeze your credit if you've been impacted by the incident.)

A brief refresher: Equifax discovered a breach in late July but didn't disclose it until September. That's when it announced that 143 million US customers were affected by a data breach involving names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers, and credit card numbers.

Shortly after, Equifax's CEO Richard Smith resigned (with a massive pension), and two other executives retired.

A month later, in October, Equifax found that 2.5 million more people were impacted after it completed "the remaining investigative tasks and quality assurance procedures built into the investigative process."

Outraged customers sued Equifax. The company's reputation tanked. Smith had to testify before Congress about what went wrong. Investors were not impressed by any of this.

Equifax said in a statement to BuzzFeed News on Thursday, "The company doesn't expect additional increases to the number of consumers whose government-issued identification numbers, like Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers, were stolen."

Awesome.

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