Equifax Company suffered white collar theft in March 2017. Equifax is a credit bureau that gathers and compiles data on people and companies all over the globe. Eight hundred million users and about eight million sales make up its user group. Equifax offers customers direct fraud prevention services in addition to providing credit and depending on businesses for data and services. Customers' names, addresses, driver's license information, and social security numbers were accessed during the hack. About 209,000 employee credit card details were stolen. The hackers also stole data from the private business. (Michael, Anita & Jordan, 2017). It is believed that the firm's commission had an idea of the hack since last year, but they did not come forward to address the situation, rather they were issued after the hackers gained a lot from their trades. Equifax goes ahead to blame the software that was used at the moment, saying that apache strut that was created by apache foundation was the one used to hack into their systems.
The victims who had less to lose in the gross breach were the most affected. Most of these people said that they were not able to raise funds in case of such emergencies. It was found that a sixty percent of the whole population had to borrow money to survive after the hack. Others sought help from the government (Mathew, 2017). In other cases the victims had the risk of discontinued benefit payment once their social security numbers were found with any fraudulent activity, leading to low income.
Equifax is said to suffer a considerable economic damage. They will incur a lot of cost in fixing the problem. Losing a lot of customers are also going to be experienced by the company. It will be hard to ask people to entrust them with their data, if at some point that information will be available at some other networks that were not entrusted with the information. They are also going to lose their reputation because their customers will lose faith in them. They are going to spend a lot of money on the legal fees and also pay a lot for credit monitoring. To the customers, their privacy has been lost. Their health data, financial information, and security information has been stolen from them, from an institution to which that they entrusted their data.
White collar crime has been profiled by criminal experts that they are associated with specific character traits. Some of them include narcissistic personal tendencies, authority this was according to Aguilera and Valdera (2008), and cultural hedonism. In the Equifax, it can be observed that the main problem might have been the authority since they did not realize that their systems were being hacked. They could have had employees who were involved; employees were entrusted with the systems but took advantage and helped in system hacks.
In 2006 construct validity study by Blickle et al. of criminals and non-offenders they also stated that white collar crime could have been caused by cultural hedonism. In this study, it was observed that people who enter business aim at achieving a particular accumulated wealth (Elizabeth, 2017). It was noted that a significant percentage of the individuals in business lived beyond their means and this could be explained by fraud and cyber-crimes.
Blickle et al. also stated that white collar crime could be associated with narcissistic personality tendencies. This disorder with associated with an urge of admiration, entitlement, the feel of being wanted and also demands and illusions. Therefore this led the employees in organizations committing cyber-crimes. However, according to, Foster & Campbell, 2007, Foster, Campbell & Twenge, 2003 they argue that the disorder is on a dimensional scale and it should not classify on the absolute level (Mathew, 2017).
In conclusion since authority is the primary cause of the frauds, then we would make sure that prosecutions considered. Authority, in this case, would involve the high-level executives, and then it would mean that even the low-level employees would lie to keep their jobs and hence they would end up getting away with the crimes. Therefore, the whole corporation should be prosecuted. This is cheaper and easier, and because no company is above the government, it means that the stakes would be high.
References
Weise, E. (2017, September 18). Equifax says it was hacked in March, months before latest breach. Retrieved September 25, 2017, from https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/09/18/equifax-data-breach-second-hacked-march/679474001/
Schwartz, M. (n.d.). Equifax's May mega-breach might trace to march hack. Retrieved September 25, 2017, from https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/equifax-mega-breach-may-trace-to-march-hack-a-10319
Riley, M., Sharpe, A., & Robertson, J. (2017, September 18). Equifax suffered a hack almost five months earlier than the date it disclosed. Retrieved September 25, 2017, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-18/equifax-is-said-to-suffer-a-hack-earlier-than-the-date-disclosed
