First off, let me just say that none of us had used that filing cabinet in a while. Those papers sitting on top just looked like any old stack of totally inconspicuous papers. Oh, God, paperwork, most of us thought. You know that feeling when you see a stack of papers and think, Oh, God, paperwork? That’s what we were feeling. That’s why we didn’t go near it.
Secondly, when we were breached, 145.5 million Americans had their Social Security numbers stolen. 145.5 million people. What is 2.4 million compared to that? 2.4 million is such a small number, percentage-wise, compared to the initial number of people we thought were compromised by the breach. A big deal, but not the biggest deal.
Also, those of you in the 2.4 million group should really consider yourselves lucky. Probably because you were all under an otherwise completely innocuous seeming stack of papers, only your names and driver’s license numbers were stolen. Can you imagine if it had been worse than that? That would’ve been awful.
Still, we understand that this is still a big problem, and that our cybersecurity could use some upgrades. But before we go ahead and spend a lot of money on that, why not just hide the rest of you guys under similar stacks of papers that no one wants anything to do with? You know? This whole experience has taught me that the only real way to keep your information safe is to have it somewhere no one wants to go near. That’s truly the only lesson I’ve learned from this experience. In fact, I’ve started hiding my personal info at my mother-in-law’s. It’s worked for me so far.
Anyway, we’re really sorry. We’ll of course be offering the same credit monitoring and identity theft protection we offered to the original victims of the breach. But to be honest, those guys had it way worse than the 2.4 million of you who just had your driver’s license numbers stolen. So maybe you should just suck it up.
Sincerely,
Paulino do Rego Barros Jr., CEO of Equifax
