Shares of Equifax (NYSE: EFX) have been under severe pressure following the announcement of the data breach last month. After a 37% decline following the announcement, shares were able to bounce off those lows as investors assumed that most over reacted and time would move on.
Thursday this week it was reported that Equifax had suffered another cyberattack on its credit report assistance page. A report from Ars Technica had initially reported that hackers altered their credit report assistance page which would send users viruses that pretended to look like adobe flash errors. The company said, as shares began to tank, that is had problems with an online customer help page and that this was caused by a vendor's software code and not by a cyberattack.
"The vendor's code running on an Equifax website was serving malicious content" the company said in a statement made later in the day. Equifax sait that the code was removed from the customer help page and would be taken offline for further investigation. Remember that the initial data breach was found to be due to their failure to update a piece of software after they identified it's vulnerability earlier in the year.
Investors continue to remain skeptical of any and all news out of the credit reporting bureau. The lack of trust in the company has led to a lack of trust by Wall Street analysts. While there are some that believe this is a good thing, which will cause the credit reporting agencies to step up their security, there are still many that have lowered ratings, and price targets for now. Shares were lower on Thursday by 1.53% and are lower on the year by over 8%.