ABSTRACT

It seemed to come out of nowhere. All of a sudden one of the most trusted companies in the world unraveled, devolving from the domain of the revered into the realm of the breached. Following the Equifax breach announced in September 2017, individual Equifax account holders spent approximately $1.4 billion on credit freeze and monitoring fees in the wake of the attack. In the advent of such security incidents, it is difficult to quantify the true impact of a breach in terms of how it affects businesses and consumers in their day-to-day lives. Our society has become so dependent on technology that we are reliant on the delivery of the information services for many aspects of our daily lives. What do we do if these critical services are interrupted or compromised? What if we are denied access to these critical services, or if an attacker is able to impersonate us, gaining access to our information, our monetary resources, or our online identity?