As many as 143 million U.S. customers could be affected.

Consumer credit reporting giant Equifax announced today that a cybersecurity incident may have affected as many as 143 million American customers.

Sources indicate that the data breach was actually discovered by Equifax on July 29 — so the company has been aware of the issue and has been performing an investigation which is now complete.

"Criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files," the company explained in a statement.

The list of stolen information was extensive, as hackers were able to access a range of sensitive details such as Social Security numbers, names, birth dates and addresses. The hackers may have also acquired license numbers, too.

As many as 209,000 U.S. credit card numbers were also stolen during this incident. This comes in addition to dispute documents containing data on an additional 182,000 people.

 As of right now, Equifax is in the process of alerting customers who may have been impacted by this security incident. These alerts are being distributed via snail mail. The company is also cooperating with federal and local authorities.

Of course, this isn’t the only data breach announcement to make headlines as of late.

Singapore’s AXA Insurance has also revealed that the company suffered a cybersecurity incident that expose the personal information of at least 5,400 customers’ email addresses, birth dates and mobile numbers.

In another incident, Time Warner Cable — which is now Spectrum — announced last week that about four million Time Warner customer records were exposed when two cloud-based AWS S3 buckets were left wide open to the public. Data was exposed from between November 10, 2017 to July 7, 2017. The exposed data included transaction numbers, MAC numbers, account numbers, user names and more.

A new breed of hacktrepeneurs has awoken and they have little to fear and everything to gain by infecting as many companies as possible and extorting money from them. Apex Technology Services stands ready to protect your company regardless of whether it’s located in New York City; White Plains, New York; Connecticut; Australia; Europe; or anywhere else. Our full suite of cybersecurity and IT support services is at your disposal, enabling you to spend less time worrying about and more time growing your business.

To ensure your security, consider one of our most popular services — Auditing & Documentation — which pinpoints vulnerabilities in your infrastructure, process flow and internal security procedures.