Lee B

It was in my local Sunday Paper in print but here is the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/business/equifax-data-breach.html?mcubz=3r

I forgot to mention that they also have pretty complete databases of public information like birth records, death records, drivers license info etc, which they match with our credit info and you guessed it they sell it.

The New York Times has a long detailed article about the evolution of Equifax. I encourage everyone to read it ! Several things that caught my attention: 1. Equifax is totally focused on the marketing of their data brokerage services ! 2. On a daily basis they data mine all of our social media interactions i.e. Facebook, Twitter etc, match that up with everyone's credit information and sell that information. 3. Almost all of the large employers like Walmart, Kroger etc give Equifax all of their payroll information which is then matched with everyone's credit info and sold ! 4. They currently have the payroll info of 50 % of all the employees in the U S, which they market to human resource departments. 5. With the exception of a few credit union officials, no one from a good sized financial institution of any kind will comment. 6. Pete Mills,a senior vice president at the Mortgage Bankers Association said, "We don't really have a choice to opt out of the credit reporting system." After all Equifax likes to refer to itself as "Trusted stewards of Data" I think I will have reread "Brave New World" and "Animal Farm"

I can honestly say that in 25 years, I don't recall any draft dupiicates, incorrect amounts or disputed amounts from etransactions. I do recall multiple times having to provide revenue agencies front and back copies of cancelled checks to the wrong place, because the check payment was posted by a low level employee to the wrong place.

As a practical matter, the move toward efiling and epayments is combination of budgetary pressures at both the state and federal level and the resulting desire to improve productivity in order to reduce personnel costs. In addition, revenue agencies are a favorite whipping boy for politicians who then cut their budgets. As a result the IRS is planning on reducing our ability to call and talk to IRS employees by implementing interactive bot apps to handle most questions. This trend is well under way and is not going to slow down. One of my payroll clients received a failure to file notice for their 2nd quarter Oregon Payroll Reports, when I had filed it online and had an email acknowledgement of the processing of the report by the state. It turns out they had received and processed the report, but it was sitting in limbo and the processing of the report was not finalized and recorded. So I had to call and sit on hold for 15 minutes before I could talk to someone who put me on hold again while they tried to find the quarterly report in their data processing system. Start to finish including talking to my client, I probably spent a total of 45 minutes resolving an incorrectly issued notice. Still, I think it's an improvement over the days of using low paid temporary employees to key in each report's information or to manually open envelopes and prepare bank deposits.

The chairs of the committees in Congress that have oversight in this area have supposedly already signaled to the financial industry that no new laws will forthcoming and that "business as usual will continue". I am afraid that will will have to look the attorney generals of states like California and New York for any action and redress. Sad !

Current advice from Avast/Piriform: 1. Piriform said in a blog post its parent company Avast discovered the hack affected two products -- CCleaner v5.33.6162 and CCleaner Cloud v1.07.3191 -- on September 12. The firm has since updated the software. 2. Piriform advises Windows users to check if they are running compromised versions, delete the app, and install the new safe version

It turns out that the update that Avast is encouraging is actually an upgrade to their "Professional Version" for $24.95 minus a $ 5.00 discount.

I didn't copy the whole article, just this announcement from Avast, who makes CCleaner: "Finally, it is extremely important to us to resolve the issue on customer machines. For consumers, we stand by the recommendation to upgrade CCleaner to the latest version (now 5.35, after we have revoked the signing certificate used to sign the impacted version 5.33) and use a quality antivirus product, such as Avast Antivirus. For corporate users, the decision may be different and will likely depend on corporate IT policies. At this stage, we cannot state that the corporate machines could not be compromised, even though the attack was highly targeted." Briefly, hackers apparently found a back door in earlier versions of CCleaner, which they used to get into an estimated 2,300,000 systems including many of the best known tech firms. Will this ever stop ???

Drake, much better service and support and less money.

Personally, I would just correct it going forward.

Which software program are you using ?

Perhaps this should be a separate topic ? The SEC announced today that they recently discovered that their database containing sensitive corporate information which could have used to generate insider trading profits was hacked back in 2016. So here we all are being bounced around like ping pong balls in a game we can't see by unknown players waiting for our number to come up like a reverse lottery. Any thoughts that we as individuals have control are sadly probably delusional .

Actually, I read a story about the creation of the site. The site was deliberately created by a software engineer the day the news of the hack was first announced. He then inserted the link to his fake site into Equifax's tweet as an object lesson of how easy it is hack a company like Equifax. According to the creator, the fake site was just a dummy, which didn't collect or save any information. Very funny, I really needed a chuckle at that moment !

One of the executives who sold his stock and then had the audacity to claim he knew nothing was the Equifax CFO. #*#*#*#*

Bart, I agree that is usually what happens, although I did receive $ 4,900 from a class action lawsuit against Charles Schwab.

Just got off the phone with my long time ATX Sales Rep, where he told me that staff has repeatedly asked ATX top management to communicate with ATX users with a detailed response addressing all the problems that users had during this past tax season and specifically what is going to be done to fix those problems. According to my long time Sales Rep, "Nothing has happened." Which is exactly why I decided not to renew with ATX !

Since the IRS Budget has been cut by Congress for the last 5 years in a row and 11,000 fewer employees work there, most of whom are retiring baby boomers who were their most experienced employees, I seriously doubt it. 1. According to the IRS statistics, there has been a significant drop in successful identity theft filed tax returns. 2. The giant horsefly in the ointment is that Congress is currently pushing for the passage of a bill that would require a "Mini- Audit" of every tax return claiming the EIC, which would totally strangle tax return processing by the IRS. 3. Did anyone else notice the IRS news release where the IRS announced that they were committed to pushing ahead with replacing phone calls with employees with interactive app bots ? It's going to be a whole new world!

An excerpt from an long article by Bloomberg News: "In early March, they said, Equifax began notifying a small number of outsiders and banking customers that it had suffered a breach and was bringing in a security firm to help investigate. The company's outside counsel, Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding, first engaged Mandiant at about that time. While it's not clear how long the Mandiant and Equifax security teams conducted that probe, one person said there are indications it began to wrap up in May. Equifax has yet to disclose that March breach to the public " Now it turns out that the same intruders hacked Equifax back in March and they never disclosed or acknowledged the hack. In addition they chose not to implement the software patch that they knew would fix the problem. This company deserves the death sentence !

Under heavy pressure, Equifax has decided to waive the fees for freezing your credit. Of course they still insist that the 3 officers that sold Equifax stock had no idea about the hack which was announced 2 days later. LOL Unfortunately even if you freeze your credit, they can still sell and make huge profits with your personal info to other financial firms.

Now the attorneys smell blood, supposedly 50 different action lawsuits have been filed. The attorneys will become multimillionaires and we will each get a check for $ 10.

Perhaps it's done through changing your CAF information ?

NEW YORK — Equifax says its chief information officer and chief security officer are leaving the company, following the enormous breach of 143 million Americans' personal information. The credit data company said Friday that Susan Mauldin, who had been the top security officer, and David Webb, the chief technology officer, are retiring from Equifax immediately. Mauldin, a college music major, had come under media scrutiny for her qualifications in security. Equifax did not say in its statement what retirement packages the executives would receivEquifax disclosed last week that hackers accessed or stole the Social Security numbers, birthdates and other information. It also presented Friday a litany of security efforts it made after noticing suspicious network traffic on July 29. It said it believes the access occurred from May 13 through July 30. You couldn't make this up - the Chief Security Officer was music major in college .

According to this article, Equifax knew about the software flaw, but also knew that there was a software patch available well before the hack started and did nothing. Equifax is not only greedy, it is stupid and incompetent and doesn't care that identity theft cost Americans 16 Billion Dollars last year ! The CEO and other officials should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law ! NEW YORK (AP) -- Credit agency Equifax traced the theft of sensitive information about 143 million Americans to a software flaw that could have been fixed well before the burglary occurred, further undermining its credibility as the guardian of personal data that can easily be used for identity theft. Equifax identified a weakness in an open-source software package called Apache Struts as the technological crack that allowed hackers to heist Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses and full legal names from a massive database maintained primarily for lenders. SECURITY FOR DUMMIES The patch was released shortly afterward. Equifax said the database intrusion began in May and continued until July. Security experts said Equifax had more than enough opportunity to block intruders by sealing the security hole. "There is no excuse for not following basic cybersecurity hygiene," said Nate Fick, CEO of the security firm Endgame. "Some heads should definitely roll for this; it's only a question of how many." The company didn't respond to inquiries on Thursday

In the dim corners of my mind, it seems to me that is is considered to be an "association" which ends up filing a Form 1120. Of course I could be wrong, it wouldn't be the first time ?