We should be outraged by the incompetence of Equifax, as suggested earlier. They were not the victim, we were. Nearly half the population of America may have given up personal information to thieves, a lot of information. Now that some details are emerging, there is even more to be outraged about. The Wall Street Journal reported se­cu­rity re­searchers at Cisco Sys­tems Inc. discovered a bug in the web server soft­ware used by Equifax earlier this year. Apparently, Equifax had not updated to the lat­est ver­sion of the software. Keeping current with security patches is IT 101.

Although Equifax seems to be inept at the basics of security protection of a web server, the company is adroit when it comes to lobbying. The Wall Street Journal reported the company spent at least $500,000 on lob­by­ing Con­gress and fed­eral reg­u­la­tors in the first half of 2017. One of the key issues lobbied was to get a reduction in the le­gal li­a­bil­ity for credit-re­port­ing com­pa­nies such as themselves. I would add the best way to limit liability from breaches is to properly administer web servers and keep the software up to date.