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October 4, 2017 02:00 am

Former Equifax CEO Blames Breach On One Individual Who Failed To Deploy Patch

Equifax's recently departed CEO is blaming the largest data breach in history on a single person who failed to deploy a patch. TechCrunch reports: Hackers exposed the Social Security numbers, drivers licenses and other sensitive info of 143 million Americans earlier this summer by exploiting a vulnerability in Apache's Struts software, according to testimony heard today from former CEO Richard Smith. However, a patch for that vulnerability had been available for months before the breach occurred. Now several top Equifax execs are being taken to task for failing to protect the information of millions of U.S. citizens. In a live stream before the Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce committee, Smith testified the Struts vulnerability had been discussed when it was first announced by CERT on March 8th. Smith said when he started with Equifax 12 years ago there was no one in cybersecurity. The company has poured a quarter of a billion dollars into cybersecurity in the last three years and today boasts a 225 person team. However, Smith had an interesting explainer for how this easy fix slipped by 225 people's notice -- one person didn't do their job. "The human error was that the individual who's responsible for communicating in the organization to apply the patch, did not," Smith, who did not name this individual, told the committee.

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