Equifax Says 145.5M Affected by Breach, Ex-CEO Testifies


Equifax, the credit agency behind this summer’s breach of 143 million Americans, said this week the number of victims implicated in the breach has increased.

Paulino do Rego Barros, Jr., the company’s interim CEO, announced Monday that 2.5 million additional Americans were also impacted, bringing the grand total to 145.5 million affected individuals.

Equifax initially called its investigation around the breach “substantially complete,” but said it was still carrying out further analysis with Mandiant, a FireEye company it hired to investigate the breach, on the incident. According to Equifax, investigators didn’t find any additional vulnerabilities. The extra 2.5 million Americans figure came “during Mandiant’s completion of the remaining investigative tasks and quality assurance procedures built into the investigative process.”

The company used the opportunity on Monday to reiterate that Canadian citizens were also impacted, although far fewer than initially thought. The company said there may have been up to 100,000 Canadians affected several weeks ago however upon closer inspection, only 8,000 Canadian consumers were affected by the breach.

Equifax says its still analyzing exactly how many United Kingdom consumers have been affected by the breach and is in the middle discussions with regulators to determine how to notify them.

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Source: ThreatPost