Thanks to Equifax, your driver’s licenses, phone numbers, and emails have been exposed to hackers

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Back in September of 2017, Equifax reported a breach of their systems. This week, we now know the extent of the breach, and let me tell you, it’s pretty rough.

The company submitted a “statement of fact” this week to the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlining exactly what happened on September 7th of last year, when the breach occurred. Equifax had originally posted many of the numbers but were somewhat vague about certain details, including a lack of explanation on what was referred to as “disputed documents.”

In their statement, they cite the reason as,

With respect to the data elements of gender, phone number, and email addresses, US state data breach notification laws generally do not require notification to consumers when these data elements are compromised, particularly when an email address is not stolen in combination with further credentials that would permit access.

Well, we now have a better idea of the number of people actually affected by the breach. You can check the numbers below.

• 145.5 million Social Security numbers
• 99 million had address information exposed
• 27.3 million had gender information exposed
• 20.3 million Phone numbers
• 17.6 million Driver’s license numbers
• 1.8 million Email addresses
• 209,000 Credit card numbers
• 97,500 Tax Identification numbers
• 27,000 had the state of their driver’s license exposed

Disputed documents stolen during the breach:

• 38,000 driver’s licenses
• 12,000 Social Security and Taxpayer ID cards
• 3,200 passports and passport cards
• 3,000 other documents (military IDs, etc.)

Equifax has been working on offering multiple solutions for those affected but hasn’t had the best track record with that – having pointed users to sites that had malware and one that was just plain fraudulent.

Josiah Motley

Former KnowTechie editor.