Extortion & Ransom? Diving Into the IRS/Equifax Cyber-Rabbit Hole

First, for those not familiar with the Equifax data breach, or what to do about it, here it is straight from Federal Trade Commission:

If you have a credit report, there’s a good chance that you’re one of the 143 million American consumers whose sensitive personal information was exposed in a data breach at Equifax, one of the nation’s three major credit reporting agencies.

Here are the facts, according to Equifax. The breach lasted from mid-May through July. The hackers accessed people’s names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers. They also stole credit card numbers for about 209,000 people and dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 people. And they grabbed personal information of people in the UK and Canada too.

As for the IRS awarding a no-bid contract to equifax, here’s more about the case from Politico:

The IRS will pay Equifax $7.25 million to verify taxpayer identities and help prevent fraud under a no-bid contract issued last week, even as lawmakers lash the embattled company about a massive security breach that exposed personal information of as many as 145.5 million Americans.

A contract award for Equifax’s data services was posted to the Federal Business Opportunities database Sept. 30 — the final day of the fiscal year. The credit agency will “verify taxpayer identity” and “assist in ongoing identity verification and validations” at the IRS, according to the award.

And this leads us to ask a deeper question that the MSM, Politico, and even Zero Hedge are failing to ask:

Is this contract a back-door payment for possible extortion or ransom?

Going back for the last couple of years, businesses, governments and organizations of all types have been hacked, and data has been breached, and the stolen data is held for ransom and the company is extorted for currency, usually of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin variety. Let’s look at a few examples of this.

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