The IT Nerd

From the “are you serious department?” comes this story from Marketwatch which details the fact that the Chief Security Officer of Equifax had no formal IT background as she was a music major:

Equifax “Chief Security Officer” Susan Mauldin has a bachelor’s degree and a master of fine arts degree in music composition from the University of Georgia. Her LinkedIn professional profile lists no education related to technology or security.

This is the person who was in charge of keeping your personal and financial data safe — and whose apparent failings have put 143 million of us at risk from identity theft and fraud. It was revealed this week that the massive data breach came due to a software vulnerability that was known about, and should have been patched, months earlier.

A person with no IT training working as a CSO for an organization that has the personal data of millions? That sounds like an #EpicFail. If that’s not stunning enough, there’s more:

Reporting by a few tech-savvy blogs has found that as soon as the Equifax data breach became public, someone began to scrub the internet of information about Mauldin.

Her LinkedIn page was made private and her last name replaced with “M.” Two videos of interviews with Mauldin have been removed from YouTube. A podcast of an interview has also been taken down.

Unhappily for the scrubbers, the internet archives some material and a transcript of one interview has survived.

This illustrates that once something gets put onto the Internet, it’s very hard to remove it.  But let me get to the key point. On top of having shoddy IT practices and not patching their infrastructure in a timely manner, this failure to have someone who actually knows what they are doing in terms of securing the personal information of millions underscores the fact that it should be no shock that these clowns got pwned in epic fashion. It also underscores that they need to be punished for their absolute stupidity in the most severe way possible to ensure that others who think that this sort of behavior is acceptable changes their mind immediately.

This entry was posted on September 16, 2017 at 10:32 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Equifax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.