 So, as many people probably already heard, Equifax had a data leak that could involve 143 million consumers. Now if you're not familiar with who Equifax is, they're one of the large credit reporting agencies. And if you are familiar with the R, it's because you've been super agitated because you found something on your credit report that became almost impossible to remove and you get caught in the round circle of dealing with this company that basically exists to slurp up data and come up with a rating and a value they place upon your head based on your credit rating. Which is the current credit system that we have here in the US where we decide a number and a score and a debt ratio and we decide whether or not you are worthy of being lending money. It won't rant too much about that. That system is dysfunctional on its own. What I am going to talk about is the security aspects of this. So the Equifax data leak because they have so many people who have credit. If you have a credit card, if you've applied for a car loan, a home loan, most any loan, at some point they start a credit profile and companies like Equifax have that credit profile. So they are then the reporting agency that the company you go to for the loan will use to determine your worthiness of the loan. That means you do not have an option of whether or not your data gets stored in this company. Now this company does fall under some regulation, technical regulation, and financial regulation. So they should be PCI compliant and whichever other compliance is applied to them, but the fact remains they lost the data. Now we don't have a lot of information yet, but I'm hoping a lot more comes to light and I'm hoping a full debrief is done because I want to know how they got hacked. It is more forgivable if we find out they were hacked by a unknown zero day that was used to attack them. That means a unpatched, no one knew about this particular type of security breach until it occurred. Those are more acceptable answers when it comes to breach security. But my feelings are we are going to find out that they ran security poorly. We have such a history with these companies that we find out that they just don't do a good job of security. They look at it as something that's a cost and how can we reduce that cost? How little can we spend on security and feel like we can still sleep at night? And yeah, that's kind of where I'm feeling we're going to go with this. We don't have any details. I only have some hyperbole and things I've read on Reddit from people that claim they worked there that the company did not care, used non-password protected Excel sheets to share information with all your personal data. And I don't know how truly that is. That's very speculative. Although there are a lot of people rambling on about it. I want a full disclosure from the company. What we did get though was the CEO, Rick Smith. And he had his little statement on this. So let's play it real quick. To that end, we're taking unprecedented step of offering every US consumer in the country a comprehensive package of identity theft protection and credit file monitoring at no cost. All right. So the company that screwed up all my data, if you didn't hear that, is now going to offer security monitoring of my social security number. That sounds interesting. But let's dig a little deeper right here. And here is the Trusted ID Premier, their company that they're offering. And I understand this only lasts for a year, even though they completely screwed up and lost all this data, it only lasts for a year. But I'm going to jump down to the important part of this of why you shouldn't sign up for it without really thinking about it. There's a lot of legalese. If you can see the size of this page, it's huge. Like there's a lot of stuff in here. But the part that really becomes interesting is by consenting to submit your claim to arbitration. You will be forfeiting your right to bring or participate in any class action. Yes. Of course, they want you to sign up. Hurry, sign up for us, because we're probably going to get sued by a lot of people. So please sign up. And that way, we can say, no, you don't get to benefit from suing us. Because by consenting, you submit your claim of arbitration you will be forfeiting your right to bring or participate in any class action lawsuit. Literally, I'm on their website, TrustedPremier.com, in their terms. And yes, if you sign up for them, you will do this. That's ridiculous. They actually, granted they have lawyers writing this and people are scared and are running over here to do this, this happens. But yeah, you will be consenting to submit your claim of arbitration. So be careful on that. But don't worry about the executives in case you're worried anything will actually happen to them. Maybe the SEC will get a couple of them. Three Equifix managers sold stock before cyberhack revealed. Yeah, this is interesting because of course, with the giant cyberhack like this, your stock takes a giant dump. And before it was announced, apparently, intrusion on July 29th, regulatory findings show that days later, chief financial officer sold a million dollars worth of stock and president of US Information Solutions exercised his option to dispose of half a million and roll off ploder president of workforce solutions sold a quarter million. I have a feeling the chief financial officer probably knew that there was a breach. I mean, was he on vacation? I don't know. We're not gonna know, but this is, and it's a small percentage of stock, but still 1.8 million, they're like, yeah, let's cash this out because in about a month from now, there's gonna be this little announcement we do. So that's kind of my thoughts currently on the Equifix. I'm gonna be following the story because I'm always fascinated with the details of how they got breached. I wanna know, did they follow best security practice and they did everything right and something unknown came into them? Or were they doing everything wrong and it was an eventual matter of time before they got hacked, as we've seen with some other companies where poor security from top to bottom, it was kind of like hacker's choice. Which one of these things do we wanna breach? So we follow the story and hopefully be doing a full debrief. I really would love the details revealed because sharing the details of how they were breached hopefully can help us all in understanding how to avoid breaches in the future. Security is hard. I will be the first to admit that working in IT, it's a cat and mouse game and we're really on the almost the losing end because there is way more people attacking systems and trying to poke holes through them than are people securing those systems. And I do know a lot of companies that do look at security as an inconvenient cost that they have to do. So that's my thoughts on the Equifix security breach and the disgustingness of forfeiting your claims. So please think about it before you say, I'm not a lawyer or a person who's an expert on this stuff, but I'm just kind of pointing out the obvious holes that forfeiting your right to sue them when they lost all your data that you didn't have a choice or whether or not they would put your data in there is just terrible. I'm also gonna throw a few links in the description here. My understanding is one of the best things to do is do a credit freeze. So this isn't a problem. And I'm sure there's gonna be a million sites popping up that are fake about credit freezes. And so I'm gonna go ahead and link to the Federal Trade Commission one so you can start there and do some reading and make some decisions of what you wanna do. Please consult with a financial expert because I'm more of a security and IT guy but I'm trying to think of what to do myself but probably a credit freeze seems good because they lost a lot of data and it's everything from driver's license, social security numbers. So they have a lot of information of you whoever went into this data. So all right, thank you very much. And if you like the content here, like and subscribe.