In the magical land of adulthood, there is this thing called credit that grants you mystical powers. These powers let you get good interest rates for cars, houses, and high credit card limits. This credit is effectively what makes the adult world work. Without it you are utterly screwed, and with it you are somewhat screwed if it is not decent.
I know we are talking about credit, but this is not a class on finance, and I am most defiantly not a life coach. I’m talking about credit because today I want to talk about the recent Equifax hack. If you haven’t heard about the Equifax hack, I promptly ask you to return to the US from whatever planet you’re currently living on.
Wikipedia cites Equifax as a consumer credit reporting agency that collects
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I have no issue with making use of free software and programs that are available to minimize cost, but every decision comes with positive and negative consequences. The negative consequence for Equifax is the fact that open source means that anyone can look at and view the source code without the proper encryption or patch. Without the most recent patch from Apache installed on it’s server, Equifax found itself at the hands of a hacker group that not only exploited Equifax but millions of consumers. These hackers could freely view the code of Apache Struts and exploited the bugs that were written into the code. The did so by uploading files to trigger these bugs that sent malicious code or commands to the server1. With this information, they accessed Equifax’s massive collection of user data, and did what any hacker or hacker group would do. Personally, I’m not quite sure what’s more alarming: my social security information being affected or the fact that 66% of Fortune 100 companies use the same Apache Struts that was hacked. The companies include: the IRS, Citigroup(a major banking group), Virgin Atlantic, Office Depot, and