After an indiscriminate hiatus, I’m back and whoa Nelly, stuff is happening in the world. Let’s recap and try to work through it together, shall we?
Equifax is Definitely Ran by Monkeys
I don’t think there is a single American who hasn’t heard, but Equifax, one of the three consumer credit reporting companies in the US, totally biffed it when they let hackers steal 143 million social security numbers, as well as other personal data. That’s half of the population of the US, and driver’s licenses and credit cards were among some of the data that was stolen.
As it turns out, the hack was done through an exploit on Equifax’s website. I won’t get too technical, but the platform Equifax was using to manage their data had a reported vulnerability, and instead of patching it, they did nothing. A company that shuffles around the financial information of essentially all Americans back-burnered a critical security update. Nice work, dummies. I always like playing devil’s advocate, even against myself, and the process to patch this vulnerability wasn’t just a simple update. You know how most people gripe and moan when their phone needs to run some updates every couple months and reboot? This wasn’t going to be that easy. In fact, it’s very likely that Equifax would have had to do some development to get their systems ready for the patch. That said, they had two months, and they shuffle around the financial information of most Americans.
At least their damage control is on fleek, right? Well…
After knowing about the hack for two months, and knowing that the financial information of millions of individuals had been stolen, Equifax got around to announcing it, and rolled out a website designed to let you plug in your information to see if you were affected. I won’t bother linking to the website, for three reasons:
- Equifax got hacked and 143 identities were stolen. If I’m lucky enough to not be on the list, why would I want to bother plugging my details into a form made by these incompetent baboons?
- By using the site to check to see if they screwed you over, you are agreeing (according to their fine print) to not take legal action if they actually did screw you over, which they probably did.
- Because fuck those guys.
So things aren’t looking good for Equifax, or their customers, which is everybody, even if you never wanted to be.
As icing on the cake, Equifax has been sending people to a phishing site on Twitter. Programming superhero Nick Sweeting created a fake site using a slightly different domain name than Equifax’s freshly rolled-out security site. Equifax then tweeted links to this site on four separate occasions. Let this sink in: Employees of Equifax, in the midst of the worst data breach in history, ever, shared links to a fake website to attempt to mitigate damage control. Holy chodeberries, are you bad at your job!
President Trump Says More Dumb Stuff
From calling the insane, Cartman-esque dictator of North Korea ‘Rocket-Man,’ to inventing a new country and telling the UN how great it was, everyone’s favorite empty bag of last year’s candy corn is back from his trip around the US selling hats to hurricane survivors and blessing us all with his lack of proficiency at being a president. Homeboy is still tweeting like he’s fighting to win the election.
The greatest influence over our election was the Fake News Media “screaming” for Crooked Hillary Clinton. Next, she was a bad candidate!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 22, 2017
I’ve Got Some Stuff Going On
Despite all of the flea-infested primates throwing their dookie all over the place, I’m working hard on a few of those notorious projects I keep talking about. One is launching in about a month. I’ll talk about it more in a few days, but it’s going to be fun.
I haven’t checked in on my Best Self Journal, but it has been helping. I haven’t used it much during the last week and a half, but some of the habits have been sticking. Some, not all. Still, I owe myself a recap on that, and it’s coming. For now, I’m all like:
when u tryin to reach ur life goals pic.twitter.com/86Wpm080a5
— Reverend Scott (@Reverend_Scott) September 18, 2015
