Equifax reports hackers accessed up to 143 million US consumers’ information.
Equifax discovered the breach on July 29. Just today, the public finds out about the breach. In the interim, three Equifax executives dumped about $1.8 million in Equifax shares.
Hey, why not? It’s only a “small percentage” of their holdings.
Credit reporting firm Equifax reported on Thursday a breach in which cyber criminals gained access to personal information on as many as 143 million U.S. consumers.
The firm said the “cybersecurity incident” resulted in hackers accessing names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and other personal information on as many as 143 million consumers. The U.S. population is estimated to be around 324 million, according to the Census Bureau.
Thousands also had their credit card numbers and dispute documents accessed.
Equifax said in a statement that hackers “exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability” to gain unauthorized access to the files between mid-May and July. However, the company’s investigation has turned up “no evidence” that hackers accessed the company’s core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases.
Don’t Worry, It’s Not “Core Data”
Hackers got 143 million credit card numbers, social security numbers, and birthdates.
Don’t worry, that’s not core data.
Time To Dump Stock
Bloomberg reports Three Equifax Managers Sold Stock Before Cyber Hack Revealed.
Three Equifax Inc. senior executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered a security breach that may have compromised information on about 143 million U.S. consumers.
The credit-reporting service said late Thursday in a statement that it discovered the intrusion on July 29. Regulatory filings show that three days later, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099. Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock on Aug. 2. None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 scheduled trading plans.
The three “sold a small percentage of their Equifax shares,” Ines Gutzmer, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based company, said in an emailed statement. They “had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time.”
Equifax said in its statement that intruders accessed names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s-license numbers, as well as credit-card numbers for about 209,000 consumers. The incident ranks among the largest cybersecurity breaches in history.
Equifax shares tumbled 13 percent to $124 in extended trading at 7:49 p.m. in New York.
SEC Investigation Coming
A SEC investigation is undoubtedly on the way. Any findings will be swept under the rug. The absolute worst that likely to happen is a tiny fine. I suspect nothing at all will happen.
Out of the Blue
Here is the key point: “None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 scheduled trading plans.”
That’s OK. $1.8 million is only a “small percentage”.
Nothing will be done about this. Instead, every now and then, the SEC will make a case out of someone like Martha Stewart. At the very least, enforce the laws, or don’t. This type of action creates mistrust.
At the very least, enforce the laws, or don’t. This type of action creates mistrust.
Equifax Tweets
This gives rise to totally inane positions such as
I propose something else.
Why Not Make Insider Trading Legal?
Insider trading laws do not apply to members of Congress. They can be on any committee about to issue a ruling on anything and take advantage. Hey, why not spread the wealth?
That may sound sarcastic, but it’s not. Insider trading is not going away.
What precisely is wrong about having information and acting on it?
Had there not been insider trading laws, the public may have found out about this long ago. Instead, insiders dumped shares over time and no one knows how many of their friends got tipped off as well.
If you think I am making a self-serving proposal, think again.
I do not know a damn thing and likely never will. If nothing else, end the hypocrisy of it all.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Either way, the law at a minimum needs to be changed so congresscritters have to abide by the same laws as everyone else.
Bwah-Ha! Ha! Ha! *Aaaack*!!!! ….heart…….attack…….AAAAAACK……
April 2009 brought “news” which must have had Rumsfeld laughing all the way to the bank: SWINE FLU HITS THE U.S.! (After a “hitherto unknown” virus caused 60 or so deaths in Mexico.)
The U.S. public and the rest of the world was immediately subjected to a controlled-panic campaign reminiscent of the bird flu and the SARS scares of previous years. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, said that the disease has “pandemic potential”.
This may be true. Scientists said the virus combines genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not seen before. Amazing! Suddenly a deadly virus combining DNA from three different species appears from nowhere! Or really nowhere? Or perhaps from a U.S. biowarfare lab?
In response to the scare the U.S. government “released” 12.5 million of its stockpiled 50 million doses of Tamiflu, which it had previously bought from Roche, which has a manufacturing and commercialization license from Gilead Sciences Inc., the inventor of Tamiflu. Donald Rumsfeld served as Gilead’s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million. Assuming the swine flu panic takes off (and what’s to stop it?) Tamiflu, despite being worthless as a cure for any kind of flu, will be in huge demand, Roche will hardly be able to turn it out fast enough, and Rumsfeld will be in clover.
http://islandrepublicofdan.blogspot.com/2013/05/bird-flu-tamiflu-and-donald-rumsfeld.html
Congress did pass a law, the STOCK Act in 2012, making it illegal for Congressmen and Senators to trade on inside information. However, it only took a few months for them to quietly gut that act so that it is only the merest impediment to their unethical looting. Rather than providing links here, just search on something like “Congress insider trading”.
If I were ever on a jury for an insider trading case, there is no way in Hades that I would ever vote guilty (unless it was a Congressman). I will not tolerate one standard of conduct for Congress and another for everyone else.
I also would never vote guilty on a conspiracy charge. If someone commits an illegal act, that is one thing. But conspiracy is nothing other than the exercise of free speech, which is protected under the Constitution. Two people can talk all they want, but if no act follows then they have done nothing wrong. The govt always throws in a conspiracy charge in the hope that, even if the jury exonerates the defendants on the other 20 charges, they will find them guilty of “conspiracy”, which then allows the judge to hit them with maximum sentences and make them felons with all attendant legal restrictions.
“If I were ever on a jury for an insider trading case, there is no way in Hades that I would ever vote guilty (unless it was a Congressman). I will not tolerate one standard of conduct for Congress and another for everyone else.”
Last time i was called in for jury duty, i brought up juror nullification, as no banker has been criminally prosecuted for their crimes. I was not going to sit in judgement of the defendant, when there was no possibility of sitting in judgement of the bankers, who were being held above the law.
Add in Hillary Clinton.
It was discovered on 29 July and they sold on 2 Aug. And the bosses didn’t know????????!ARE YOU SHITTING ME?????
Hang the guilty bastards – after fining them 100 X what they made….,
THEY ARE LYING SONS OF BITCHES….
hah! this was child’s play. read my choicepoint comment below.
Teh Russians!!!11 POO-TIN!!!!! I-zzzagonna-git-U!!!!!!
POO-TINS!!!!!!
The final determination whether to prosecute the insider trading execs will come down to whether they have political connections high enough up in the DC food chain to persuade the DA to claim there’s not enough evidence to prove the guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Sort of like what happened between Comey and Hillary.
The stock exchanges should have their own rules for things like insider trading.
It would be very interesting if we had an exchange with strict rules, and another “anything goes” exchange. Then we could compare them. Or is the Chinese stock exchange already the latter, as long as the company does not PO the government?
Good stuff, man. Made me ‘LOL’ 4realzz!
“Why Not Make Insider Trading Legal?”
Yup! It is also difficult to prove. But then think of poor lawyers!
That said, this alternative rule of law for sleezy characters is what will bring a civil war as more and more people wake up!
Technically, the stock was ready to fall. from the late 1990’s to the late 2000’s the stock was in a bear market correction. the last 8 years the stock entered an exponential run. In 2016 the strong pull-back warned a top was forming. The past 4 months have been a choppy advance confirming momentum was slowing and a top was even closer. There has been a divergence between price and the relative strength indicator; prices making new highs but the RSI making lower highs.
When a bubble pops it most often bottoms below the starting point. That means EFX is heading below $20 per share, the support level of the 1990-2008 bear market.
But it’s always easier to blame a single event than a naturally occurring process.
Or it was because of the news.
So that guy who was murdered… he was probably gonna have a heart attack sooner or layer anyway.
HAHAHAHAHA – CLASSIC response…..
Not only does Bloomberg trade against you, so does your Congressman and Senator.
“Not only does Bloomberg trade against you, so does your Congressman and Senator.”
Not to mention every brokerage house. Goldman Sachs refers to clients as Muppets.
MIsh,
I think I found a gaping hole in the MMT arguments that you might have noticed too or would be interested in. The theory is cooking the books in double entry bookkeeping terms by leaving out non-financial and often tangible assets. But, at least they do say, they are only counting financial assets. Hugh?
MMT makes unaccounting arguments with the often stated limitation that only financial instruments are accounted for. I think they always leave out the tangible assets and services only counting financial assets. Well, when real goods and services ( tangible assets or non-financial assets) from the private sector are are traded for printed money (a financial asset) from the public sector, both sectors would each have to do double entry bookkeeping to properly account for it all.
Private sector
cr. tangible asset valued at $1B
dr. cash $1B
Public sector
cr. cash, the deficit or As I think accumulated profit account $1B
dr. tangible asset $1B.
So, why does MMT apear to balance. It is cash accounting. If they did proper double entry bookkeeping for the sectors it would not. But, if they merge the sectors together and treat each sector as accounts it can numerically work but not in fact.
They should really require double entry bookkeeping in schools. Both, Carnegie and Rockafeller learned it as boys.
Let me get it straight. Equifax collects information on consumer credit without the knowledge and consent of said consumers, and then looses the data to hackers. Correct?
No. Equifax first charges YOU for the cost of collecting data that they shouldn’t have in the first place. Then they charge you for the cost of a “credit check” (they bill the lender, but you pay the credit check fee). Equifax also collects revenue selling data that doesn’t belong to them to telemarketers, law enforcement, and political campaigns… and to employers who run credit checks instead of evaluating qualifications.
Its only later that Equifax loses your data to identity thieves, and then charges you for ID theft protection.
If the data they collected at your expense turns out to contain errors, and those errors prevent you from getting a mortgage or a job? Well that is the consumer’s problem, Equifax takes zero responsibility for the (lack of) quality of their work.
if an adverse action is to be taken based on credit bureau/background check info, you will be notified in advance of the action to allow any inaccurate info to be corrected (at least that’s how it’s supposed to work)
I was writing about how things work here on planet Earth. Not how they are supposed to work on some fantasy world 🙂
When money is debased and society financialized; “good,” solid money that has been earned, is displaced by “bad” money created out of thin air as credit. Resulting in an ever increasing share of everyone’s purchasing power, being credit issued by someone else, rather than earnings/savings beholden to noone. Those someone elses then needs to run background checks, spy operations and body cavity inspections on anyone who needs to buy anything.
Such that everyone ends up existing solely at the mercy of the “judgment” of some worthless leech somewhere. It’s no different than that other progressive dream state: Noone has any money, and everyone has to petition the state for what some bureaucrat deems that they “need.” Just a different way of getting there, and a slightly different set of obfuscations put up to pretend the racket is for “the good of the people.”
There’s no other way to operate the kind of fully financialized, fiat money enabled racket that the West currently suffers under; solely for the benefit of a small, utterly expendable down to a person, ruling clique.
hmm, where have i heard this before? wasn’t choicepoint spun off from equifax?
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/sec-examines-selling-of-stock-at-choicepoint/
“CEO Derek Smith and President Douglas Curling earned $16.6 million from ChoicePoint stock sales after the company learned of a major security breach and before the news was made public”
of course, sec found no wrongdoing because they believed smith when he said “There is no way that a CEO can know everything that is going on as it relates to an operation”
(especially a CRIMINAL data breach identified six months before the breach was made public…yeah)
@mish, see my comment above re: “A SEC investigation is undoubtedly on the way. Any findings will be swept under the rug. The absolute worst that likely to happen is a tiny fine. I suspect nothing at all will happen.”
Done for financial gain. Tell me that equally adept hacking isn’t being completed and laying in wait as adversarial tools to use against our infrastructure. For instance, against self-driving cars and truck without manual backup.
Breach at Equifax May Impact 143M Americans
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/09/breach-at-equifax-may-impact-143m-americans/
Equifax, one of the “big-three” U.S. credit bureaus, said today a data breach at the company may have affected 143 million Americans, jeopardizing consumer Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver’s license numbers.
Equifax said the attackers were able to break into the company’s systems by exploiting an application vulnerability to gain access to certain files. It did not say which application or which vulnerability was the source of the breach.
It would honestly be kind of fun to wake up one morning, and read that the head of the NSA sold all his dollar holdings for Rubles, the day before a major hack shut down huge sections of the US financial infrastructure. And that he being dragged before congress, to answer for why he didn’t tip them off as well….
“A SEC investigation is undoubtedly on the way. Any findings will be swept under the rug.”
Hillary Clinton.
“What precisely is wrong about having information and acting on it?”
Bruce Karatz dumped 400 million in KB Homes stock. The Toll brothers did the same, 400 million between them. Karatz dumped 150 million in July, 2005, the same month the stock topped out.
Meanwhile, Jim Cramer was telling viewers that he would never sell a Toll Brothers, because it was a land bank. What percentage did Toll Brothers stock drop?
UBS had inside information that Enron was a junk stock. Yet UBS maintained a strong buy until 4 days before Enron declared bankruptcy, when the stock was almost worthless.
That really angers me. Martha Stewart went to jail for less. I hope they rot in prison.
There shouldn’t be any “securities” law at all. Leave it up to competing exchanges to set listing requirements. If some want to have rules regarding whatever they decide to call “insider trading,” let them.
Government has no business being involved either way, and should restrict themselves to, at most, help chase down some dude running down the street with a stack of stock certificates he just grabbed off the desk of someone else.
The problem is not that they are trading on information. The problem is that they have a duty to divulge potentially material information to the stock owners. There is a conflict of interest if the same people that are entrusted with divulging material information to the owners themselves own stocks or sell the information to partial interests. There is also the problem that the stock owners, particularly the disadvantaged ones, cannot fire their asses at will and/or recoup their losses for being disadvantaged. Perhaps the best solution to this would be better/easier ways to file for damages: that would teach them.
Some news can be delayed by those looking to profit.
The profiteers having control over timing.
That’s not right.
When I worked in Hong Kong long ago insider trading was legal (since made illegal), everyone knew that, there was lots of insider trading (some company owners used to pass the time of day trading their own stock), and the stock market worked perfectly well.
Its great that some ambulance chasers are already looking to profit from a massive class action lawsuit against these crooks.
But the FBI has a basic credibility problem already (Hillary, Comey, Clapper, etc) — if these “executives” that traffic in stolen data (before letting the stolen data be hacked because if the executives deliberate neglect) somehow manage to live another day outside a prison, the FBI is going to find itself in the same position as law enforcement in other banana republics.
Why should any FBI agent expect public support (or respect) if cr@p like this is allowed to go unpunished? Arrest these crooks and lock them up. Plenty of ordinary citizens are incarcerated over a heck of a lot less.
Maybe someday we’ll all figure out that these huge data silos and “algorithmic” scoring of people in general is a bad idea.
But not as long as there’s plausible deniability:
“No, it’s not us, we don’t care that you racked up all that debt when your kid got cancer, the algo says you’re a high risk individual.”
“No, of course we don’t redline, the algo says black people don’t want to live in these neighborhoods!”
“No, we don’t think you’re a terrorist because of your skin color, only because the algo says you fit the profile!”
they hacked themselves to help sell their product
??????? Well…..IF I were to buy some product to protect myself now…..IT FO’ SUR AIN’T GONNA’ BE FROM EXPERIAN !!!
They hacked themselves through their lock/unlock code being just a timestamp. https://twitter.com/EquifaxInsights/status/768613719769161728