The CSO and CIO of credit reporting agency Equifax have announced their retirements following one of the largest breaches of consumer private financial data in history, impacting 143 million US and 400,000 British customers.
While they've announced this as a 'retirement', many believe these were forced as a result of the news that emerged last week which found that Equifax ignored a vital security patch 2 months prior to the cyber attack.
Equifax released a statement last Friday leaving many with more questions than answers but started by claiming they first noticed and started blocking 'suspicious network traffic associated with its US online dispute portal application' on July 29, before taking the app offline the following day.
Equifax claimed in an internal review that they spotted a flaw in an open-source software package called Apache Struts used in the dispute portal, which was then fixed with a software patch and brought the portal back online. But that vulnerability has been known publicly since March 2017, with a patch fix provided shortly thereafter.
Equifax has not said why the software used in the online dispute portal hadn't been patched earlier, but they do claim that its security organization was 'aware of the flaw' in March and that they took necessary efforts to locate and fix any vulnerable systems within the company's IT environment.'
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