Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Equifax's Security Head Was A Music Major

Oh, great.

Equifax Fiasco

(I spent all last night freezing credit reports, so I guess I should be mad--even if I believe in "transfer of learning" for musicians. )

Regardless of her job performance (which in this case was pretty bad), that article is pretty ridiculous. People work all the time in careers not related to their degrees.

I have a piano degree but own a consumer electronics company that sells products I invented, and I have a technical patent to my name.

I have two customers who are professional-quality musicians, but professional lawyers. One could prosecute a case like this, and the other could defend it.

The Equifax situation raises more questions than it answers.

There was a very-well publicized vulnerability to an add-on to a popular web server called Apache. And there was a fix ... in March. I work with computers, and even though my group doesn't do any of this kind of stuff, I remember the messages going around about the vulnerability and the fix because it was kind of a big deal - if you were running that software. The Chief Security Officer does not sit there and apply security patches all day. That's bread and butter stuff the system administrators would do. So either they: Never saw the many warnings about the vulnerability and never did anything about it. Saw the warnings and ignored them. Or weren't aware that someone at Equifax was using this particular add-on, maybe not even on a production server, but just somebody's machine somewhere, and therefore never knew it was being used. My money is on the last one. Ultimately it points to a serious communication problem between the IT people, and that kind of is part of the Chief Security Officer's job.

As one of the 143 million affected by this - I'm not pleased - no matter how it happened.

There is a lot of overlap between musicians and computer people. Plenty of Computer Science majors do music on the side, or double-major in music.


Equifax released more information about it yesterday. Still doesn't answer everything, but it's a little more clear.

Let me just add that I despise Equifax. Years ago when I had an identify theft problem, they were the most stupid and arrogant people I've ever dealt with. They more or less sided with the identity thieves. They are worse than useless. Reading the information they released, it doesn't surprise me at all that they "patched" this problem and then discovered two months later thieves had been siphoning information.

@david, fear not, this is likely a fatal error by the company, the 143 million people effected are pretty much everyone with a credit card in the United States (it seems overseas fared well as they are not really using equifax). They are going to either have to rename or shutdown, their reputation is gone, and they will be forced to deal with the problem as they cannot simply brush the effected aside as it is way to many people. (the only good thing about a large scale data breach like this)

As for the CEO being a music major, they could have triple majored in EE, CE, and ME with a perfect GPA, or been a high school drop out, and that would not matter as they are clearly not very competent. the whole management section of that company is in hot water, their CFO magically sold around 15% of his shares under a week before the news broke and equifax had already know of the problem two weeks before the news broke...

All in all a quality failure of truly epic proportions.

..

Text removed at OP's request.

It's not a failure. They are TOO BIG TO FAIL!!!!

I think while too big to fail is often a valid point, I think this mistake is also too big to not be a fail. like I said they could restructure and rename to avoid closing, but the equifax name is pretty much dead, and so are all the higher-ups. So you can pretty much say if nothing else the current status of the company will die, and it could turn over for the good (if that is possible with a credit rating company)

There are also the class action lawsuits that will pop up, factor in punitive fines, and just the sheer money loss could put them over.

There are already five class action lawsuits which wlll potentially include over 100 million Americans. There is also an SEC investigation into why executives sold stock immediately before the public announcement, and why there was a disclosure delay.

Personally, I don't believe equifax can or should survive this. It makes me shake my head that Equifax was offering one year of free account monitoring but signing up would keep you from joining the class action lawsuit. After public pressure, they eliminated the link between lack of ability to sue and the free service. I guess their damage control department was taking a vacation when they made this announcement.

Free credit monitoring? That's like asking the wolf to guard the henhouse.

IIRC, Hoagy Carmichael and Cole Porter were also lawyers.

OMG OH NO A MUSIC MAJOR!

I saw that story elsewhere and rolled my eyes pretty hard. Yeah, I have a music degree as well. But you know what? I've spent 28 years working in information technology. I know a *whole lot* more about my job than I do about being a musician, at this point. For the most part I learned all my work skills on the job. Which is what most people do.

Yeah, it was an enormous failure on her part. But blaming it on her academic degrees is absurd.

G.F. Handel was supposed to be a lawyer, but eventually dodged it. I believe a couple other classical computers were sent down the same path.

There were a couple threads on reddit about the music angle, and the reaction was refreshingly evenhanded. I've been in computers myself for more than 30 years after getting a music degree.

I'm no Handel, Carmichael, or Porter, but I am a recovering lawyer. This is my first full year since I began practicing law almost 20 years ago that I haven't acted in any professional legal capacity... a very strange feeling, to be sure, but a good one. On the other hand, ballet accompaniment does not quite come with the same remuneration as the law provided me.