If you thought you escaped the massive Equifax hack, then you’d better think again. It turns out that an additional 2.4 million people are affected by the breach, so you probably need to revisit what you thought you knew about your Equifax account.
The hack isn’t new, meaning that your data was stolen during the original breach rather than any subsequent breaches. This is a new discovery tied to the initial breach, and there’s no telling whether or not it’ll be the last such discovery.
“This is not about newly discovered stolen data,” Equifax’s interim chief executive Paulino do Rego Barros Jr said in a mind-bending statement. “It’s about sifting through the previously identified stolen data, analyzing other information in our databases that was not taken by the attackers, and making connections that enabled us to identify additional individuals.”
This is the second time Equifax expanded it’s estimate, The Washington Post explains. In October, the company raised the estimate by 2.5 million, bringing it to a total of 145.5 million victims. Add to that the 2.4 million of people who were just identified via complex database connections, and the new total is 147.9 million people. For now. Because who knows, really? Not Equifax, apparently.
These 2.4 million extra consumers affected by the hack did not have their Social Security Numbers (SSN) stolen, Equifax said in the announcement.Apparently, SSNs are what hackers wanted, and that’s why Equifax didn’t find these 2.4 million people in previous rounds of analysis.
Equifax said that it will notify these 2.4 million consumers about the new discovery. Hackers stole their names and partial driver’s license information, so Equifax will offer them identity theft protection and credit file monitoring.
