Equifax Reportedly Suffers Another Network Breach via Fake Adobe Flash Install; Company Claims Nothing Was Hacked
Credit reporting company Equifax may have suffered another massive hacking incident that victimized unsuspecting users through a hoax Adobe Flash installation. However, Equifax denies it.
Earlier in the past week, security analyst Randy Abrams shared with Ars Technica why he thinks the Equifax website may have been compromised again.
According to Abrams, he was only supposed to check his credit report via the Equifax website when he noticed suspicious activity.
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Shortly after opening the Equifax site, an Adobe Flash Player install prompt was triggered as his browser automatically opened a page with the domain hxxp//:centerbluray.info -- all of which were captured in a real-time video that Abrams was able to record.
The rarity of the domain name has understandably raised some red flags for the security analyst. Added to that is the fact that Equifax just experienced a massive hacking incident last month that compromised the sensitive and personal details of 143 million people.
According to Ars Technica, Abrams did not expect to get the apparently hoax Adobe installation page for the second time since - as explained in the report - these kinds of attacks only target a relatively few number of users and are applied only once per visitor.
However, Abrams was reportedly surprised when he got the same suspicious activities while on the Equifax website for "at least three subsequent visits." The files that Abrams got upon pursuing the instructions on the malicious webpage were also identified as malware by several antivirus tools.
Meanwhile, in a statement recently provided by Equifax, the company did not directly identify the browser activity as another hacking incident.
At first, Equifax confirmed that their IT team had decided to temporarily take down the webpage in question as they investigated what happened.
The company then explained in another email to CNBC: "The issue involves a third-party vendor that Equifax uses to collect website performance data, and that vendor's code running on an Equifax website was serving malicious content. Since we learned of the issue, the vendor's code was removed from the webpage and we have taken the webpage offline to conduct further analysis."
