SUMMARY: The Department of Justice has indicted two Chinese hackers for infiltrating U.S. companies and government agencies and stealing vast amounts of sensitive data to help Chinese companies compete with their American counterparts. John Demers, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, explains to Judy Woodruff how the cyber intrusion occurred and why it violates a 2015 U.S.-China agreement.
Equifax, a major credit reporting agency, announced Thursday that hackers had gained access to personal data from approximately 143 million of its customers.
Here's what we know.
What happened?
Sometime between mid-May and July, hackers breached an Equifax web application, gaining access to the names, birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers and, in some cases, driver's license numbers of some 143 million customers, the company said in a blog post Thursday.
Equifax discovered the breach July 29. The company says it has “no evidence of unauthorized activity on Equifax's core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases.”
Who's affected?
Equifax is one of the three major credit tracking companies in the country.
The number of customers affected in this breach amounts to nearly half of the entire U.S. population, which was 324 million in a U.S. census count in January, CNBC points out.
Along with the sensitive personal data, hackers also gained access to credit card numbers of 209,000 U.S. customers and documents related to credit report disputes from another 182,000 American consumers.
TechCrunch says citizens of Canada and the UK were also affected by the breach.
How bad is this?
As TechCrunch put it: “pretty bad.”
Reporter Ron Miller writes:
This is not the worst breach of all time by a long shot in terms of pure numbers. That distinction goes to Yahoo, now part of Oath (which was acquired by our parent company, Verizon). They had a leak involving more than a billion users.
But this leak is particularly worrisome because Equifax is a credit reporting service and tracks a history of your consumer life, credit cards, credit scores and more — and it gives the black market a potential gold mine of information about people's financial lives.
“In addition to the number [of victims] being really large, the type of information that has been exposed is really sensitive,” said Beth Givens, executive director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, told the Washington Post. “All in all, this has the potential to be a very harmful breach to those who are affected by it.”
What's next?
Equifax's stock fell 9 percent after the news broke, USA Today noted.
The company has set up a website — www.equifaxsecurity2017.com — for consumers to see whether, and how much of, their data was breached. It's offering free credit monitoring to all those affected by the hack.
Meanwhile, law enforcement and an independent cybersecurity firm are investigating the scope of the hack and how it occurred. They're expecting to release their findings in the coming weeks.
SUMMARY: Half of all Americans could have had their sensitive data compromised by a security breach at the credit reporting agency Equifax. William Brangham joins John Yang to discuss what happened and what consumers should do to safeguard their credit.
SUMMARY: Since the election, members of many scientific and research groups have been archiving government data they believe could be jeopardized by the new administration. Their fear is that without data, you can't have environmental regulation. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien took a look at one of those efforts underway at New York University.
JEROME WHITINGTON, New York University: Psyched to see everybody in the room. Really exciting.
MILES O'BRIEN (NewsHour): It's early, cold, and Saturday, and yet this room at New York University is standing room only. A few hundred volunteers are here to download and save scientific data created and curated by the federal government.
JEROME WHITINGTON: Without the data, you don't have environmental regulation.
MILES O'BRIEN: Anthropology Professor Jerome Whitington is one of the organizers of this data rescue event, the eighth in an ongoing, open-ended series which began after the election.
JEROME WHITINGTON: Now, one of the things we're going to accomplish at this event is, we're going to do a lot of work to get hard-to-access data sets, things that previous events have struggled to get.
MILES O'BRIEN: They are focused primarily on the essential science used to create environmental regulations. They worry the Trump administration's anti-regulatory bent and outright denial of peer-reviewed climate science might put the data in jeopardy.
JEROME WHITINGTON: We're less worried about it being outright deleted and disappearing, and more worried about it becoming unusable or inaccessible in specific ways.
MILES O'BRIEN: So, they are systematically building a data refuge in the cloud on servers hosted by Amazon.
Bethany Wiggin directs the University of Pennsylvania program in environmental humanities. She is an organizer of the data refuge project.
BETHANY WIGGIN, University of Pennsylvania: We have always thought of data refuge as providing an insurance policy. The situation is quite urgent. Events on the federal level are moving quickly. The changes being made to programs is happening quite fast. The situation is very uncertain.
SUMMARY: The IRS is facing tougher scrutiny than ever from Congress. Last week, lawmakers repeatedly pressed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen on why the agency wasn't moving faster to improve cybersecurity, after hackers were able to breach its computers last year. Koskinen joins Judy Woodruff to discuss their challenges.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): This is the day that the tax man cometh, or, more accurately, the day when millions of Americans will finish filing their taxes.
The Internal Revenue Service is never popular again. But this year, it's facing ever tougher scrutiny, especially from Republicans in Congress. Last week, lawmakers repeatedly pressed IRS Commissioner John Koskinen on why the agency wasn't moving faster to improve cyber-security. The IRS has acknowledged hackers were able to breach its computers last year and swipe sensitive information about hundreds of thousands of taxpayers.
John Koskinen joins me now.
Mr. Koskinen, thank you for being with us.
JOHN KOSKINEN, IRS Commissioner: Delighted to be here.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What is it going to take to restore the confidence of the American people in the IRS?
JOHN KOSKINEN: Well, I think what we have to do is first demonstrate to them that it's a fair system, that, if you hear from us, it's because of something in your return, not because who you voted for, what party you belong to, what church you go to.
Also, I think they have to understand that security of our data is a high priority. Our systems are secure. The problem has been that criminals organized around the world have a vast amount of personal information available to them. And so they are increasingly successful as masquerading as taxpayers.
So, when they have gotten into some of our applications, it's because they had already stolen the information somewhere else and could in fact pretend very effectively that they were the taxpayer.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, when members of Congress after the IRS, come after you and say, why aren't you able to prevent this kind of thing, do you say it is just not doable?
JOHN KOSKINEN: No, I say that we need to and are continuing to increase the levels of security, the authentication we require of taxpayers before they have access to significant applications that we're developing and continuing to roll out.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And that's it?
JOHN KOSKINEN: And that's it.
Well, and I think we have taken down the applications — two applications that were accessed by criminals masquerading as taxpayers. And we will bring them back up with higher levels of authentication. But, unfortunately, while it makes it more difficult, if not possible for the criminals to get through, it will be a little more difficult for the taxpayers to get through as well.
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JUDY WOODRUFF: You mentioned adequate funding. It’s something, I think, many Americans look at the IRS and they say, well, why do you need more money? You already have so much. And, you know, why can’t you make do with what you have?
JOHN KOSKINEN: Well, our budget was cut for five years in a row from 2010 to 2015 by over $1 billion, which meant that we have lost 15,000 to 17,000 employees over that time frame.
So, while we need to be more efficient and are working to do that, at some point — we have 10 million more taxpayers than we had — at some point, you actually begin to destroy the effectiveness of the agency. So whether it’s taxpayer service, taxpayer enforcement, or even protection of the database, as we continue to struggle for funding, we continue to be at risk.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And what does that mean for the American people?
JOHN KOSKINEN: Well, it means that we estimate we are collecting $4 billion or $5 billion a year less than we would if we had 5,000 revenue agents, officers and criminal investigators we used to have five years ago.
