Equifax Admits Passport Numbers Were Stolen in Breach

The fallout from Equifax's 2022 mega breach continues.

As was offset reported by the Associated Printing, the credit reporting agency's lawyers sent a letter to the Senate Banking Committee final week revealing that thousands of images of passports were stolen in the alienation. Consumers provided those images to the company to dispute inaccuracies in their credit reports.

The revelation comes later on Equifax in February specifically denied that passport numbers were included in the breach.

In a statement to PCMag, Equifax spokeswoman Meredith Griffanti said the company "manually reviewed" the photos stolen from its dispute portal and "found 3,200 images of passports or passport cards."

Equifax says these are not new victims. The company already counted all the people whose passport images were stolen in its previously announced breach totals. "Consumers who had data accessed past the attackers accept been notified and provided with a listing of the files they had uploaded, too equally the dates of those uploads," Griffanti added.

The company had not fully analyzed the documents stolen from its dispute portal when information technology said no passport numbers were affected.

When it first disclosed the alienation in September 2022, Equifax said it afflicted 143 million people, but a month later upped that estimate to 145.5 million. This March, Equifax announced it had discovered 2.4 meg additional victims, bringing the total number of impacted individuals to 147.9 million. The company initiallty said the hackers made away with names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, some driver'south license numbers, along with some credit card numbers, and other documents containing personal information.

Meanwhile, Equifax may wind up getting a just slap on the wrist from the feds over the incident. Reuters earlier this year reported that the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, Mick Mulvaney, has scaled dorsum the bureau's investigation into the breach.

About Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag's expert on fitness and smart home products. Education yoga for virtually 10 years has helped her in evaluating a range of connected health products including fettle trackers, center rate monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, force training machines, treadmills, and more. Angela also tests smart home devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, just to name a few.