Hey, you know what time it is?
It's time for us to take a look at ethical hacking in the headlines once again.
And I wanted to talk to you about the Equifax breach of 2017.
Why I picked this one is it is in the top ten list of just incredibly devastating attacks to an organization.
You can only imagine Equifax is here in the United States, and they are the entity that is checking
and maintaining and reporting on U.S. citizens credit.
So they have an incredible amount of detailed, personal, identifiable information about individuals
and their accounts with financial organizations.
And yes, they were hacked.
They ended up paying the largest fine in history for the attack taking place against all of our citizens
information.
So how did it go down?
Well, one of the things that I think you're going to love here is it went down just like we described.
It would go down.
Attackers had a tremendous amount of time on their hands.
So they were scanning the Internet, the Internet facing servers of Equifax.
They were scanning those servers tirelessly looking for vulnerabilities.
In the second step, you guessed it, they found a key vulnerability within the actual Equifax dispute
servers.
So these were public servers.
Public facing users could go in and report a dispute on their credit history with Equifax.
And those servers had the vulnerability that allowed the attackers in.
Attackers immediately started obtaining dispute documents that contain the user's PII.
But these attackers were not satisfied with this.
They wanted the username information.
They wanted Social Security numbers, they wanted the information that was in additional databases.
So sure enough, the attackers, once they were in the dispute servers, they started doing additional
levels of reconnaissance against additional servers and login credentials.
And you guessed it, they were successful.
Once they got in to the additional servers, they entered the phase.
We knew what would happen.
They began to cover their tracks and they covered their tracks very effectively.
Equifax turned in documentation about this attack and admitted that the data extraction period lasted
over 76 days.
So they got in undetected, they covered their tracks, they maintained access, and then very smartly,
they started to extract small amounts of data, only small amounts of data each day from 51 different
Equifax databases.
So they stayed in, they did very small amounts of data extraction, and they did this for week after
week after week after week, over 51 different databases.
So was the Equifax breach an example of hacking in phases?
It most certainly was.
And again, from a punishment perspective, the largest in U.S. history.