Yesterday, Equifax put out a statement that says a couple of things. First, it says that the Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer are retiring. The latter being Susan Mauldin who had no formal IT education. The former being David Webb who’s profile is still on the Equifax website for some weird reason. Though I am using a cached copy of the page from the Equifax website if Equifax decides to change that. The interesting thing is neither was mentioned by name in the statement. What’s up with that? Also, what’s up with this “retirement” thing? Is this another way of saying that they were fired with a nice big golden parachute?
The second thing is that they also put out a timeline of what happened and what they did. I am sure that they’re doing this so that they can manage the message and I’ll let you read it yourself so that you see what their message is, But abruptly canning the CSO and CIO as well as putting out a timeline like this says three things to me:
- Equifax’s internal investigation (perhaps aided by Mandiant who is the outside firm that Equifax hired to investigate this mess) shows that this mess is considerably worse than what has been publicly revealed so far.
- Equifax CEO Richard Smith is clearly trying to save his own job. Thus the CSO and CIO have been thrown under the bus. Though you could make an argument that they were also negligent in their respective positions. It’s also a safe bet that more people will be tossed under any bus that’s available before this is over.
- Financially, Equifax is screwed because the lawsuits are going to increase exponentially from this point onwards. Not only that, nobody is going to use their services going forward. Not consumers. Not credit card companies, banks, or any other financial institution. But worse than that is the overwhelming demand by millions of consumers to freeze their credit reports. Equifax (along with Experian and Trans Union) makes a lot of money selling credit information to banks so that they can offer credit cards to you. Credit freezes prevent that. Every new credit freeze is another hit on the annual bottom line. Equifax is bleeding from millions of tiny cuts, and it will only get worse.
Based on the above, this gong show is going to be better to watch than any soap opera because the hits to Equifax are going to keep coming. You should stay tuned to see this company and its CEO get smacked silly.