Happy Friday the 13th everyone

When I was brainstorming for today’s post I really wanted to target this special day. Unfortunately, my research did not provide me enough financially related (and funny) information to be able to tailor a whole article around the topic. Anyway, I just leave here the only one I fabricated. I love you Jason, please don’t come after me! 😃

This date is associated with bad luck, so I was thinking maybe I should make some bad luck memes, like the one about Othalafehu in the Cars Edition two weeks ago. While researching this topic I bumped into two articles (one from Sean at MyMoneyWizard.com and the other from Liz at ChiefMomOfficer.org) about the recent data breach at Equifax. I was aware of the event, however, I just checked it from a coder perspective. But as some fellow bloggers reported suspicious credit card activity in the recent weeks this pretty much qualifies as the most unlucky situation recently. So despite that, the phenomenon is not funny at all I thought that maybe a little bit of recap of the story could come handy.

The warmup

It all started with an innocent flirt in March. Her name was Alice and she was an innocent little server living in the Equifax server park.

While she was hanging on the internet at work a handsome hacker, let’s call him Kevin, popped up and started pinging her.

They were dating for the next couple of weeks. While enjoying their time together they shared a lot of personal information. In mid-May, they decided that they are a great match and the time has come to take their relationship to the next level. Unfortunately, it turned out that Kevin was not the nice guy he seemed to be.

After that night she refused all requests for establishing any kind of connection with him. A couple of days later, on July 29th a terrible thing happened. Lucy found out that Kevin not just abused her but left a little gift behind.

The next day she walked into her boss’s office and confessed everything. He was mad at her of course.

They removed her from duty and was sent on a mandatory holiday into a recreation center.

Ok, I know that I just made up this part, but admit that “still a better love story than twilight”. We don’t know much about that part so I had to rely on my imagination. Now let’s get serious. Just kidding, this is Funny Friday. But let’s go on with some facts.

Shit hit the fan

Shortly after they discovered the breach management gathered to discuss how to handle this unlucky situation.

And they came to the single best solution.

On 7 September, 2017, Equifax announced a cybercrime identity theft event potentially impacting approximately 145.5 million U.S. consumers. Credit card numbers for approximately 209,000 U.S. consumers, and certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers were also accessed.

/Wikipedia

The “solution”

They had to provide a solution band-aid for the people. So they created a website where the users were able to check if they were affected.

Media advised consumers to request a credit freeze to reduce the impact of the breach. Which accidentally could mean another $4.3 billion in revenue for the same company. Equifax announced on September 12 that they “are waiving all Security Freeze fees for the next 30 days”. Which is good if you are able to do it by then.

Meanwhile, we did so good work here in the personal finance blogosphere that their Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer have decided on September 15th to jump into early retirement with both feet.

Whats next?

Olsen Daines PC filed the case along with Geragos & Geragos, a firm that specializes in class-action suits. They’ll be seeking up to $70 billion in damages, which would be the largest class-action suit in US history.

We can just guess about who is in the background of the hack. There are some theories, but probably we will never know the real answer.

Thats all for today folks. Hope you enjoyed this little meme mashup about this unlucky event. If you liked it please share your thoughts in the comments and share this with whoever can benefit from the story. Also check out the posts from Sean at MyMoneyWizard.com and Liz at ChiefMomOfficer.org which provided me with info and this topic for today.

Have a Funny Friday the 13th.