Do corporations today have enough money to buy freedom from punishment, no matter how badly they mistreat you and your your personal information? You bet they do, and it's money they took from you.
Equifax, a corporation which advertises that data breaches happen all the time, and you should be ready for them, and we can help you if you pay us, has lazily failed to maintain their own systems months after blatant security holes were discovered, announced, and fixes were available.
Even though they did not perform even the basic rudimentary security updates on their own software, and subsequently lost vast troves of U.S. Citizen's personally identifiable PII information to crackers who broke in through the afore-mentioned publicly known flaw, the U.S. Congress now has pending legislation that amends existing law to a maximum of $500,000 or 1% of a person/company's net worth.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2359/text
(b) Negligent Noncompliance.—Section 617 of the Fair Credit Reporting Act is amended by adding ... the following new subsection:
Class Action Lawsuits.—With respect to a class action... arising out of the same failure to comply of a person, brought by consumers against a person who negligently fails to comply with any requirement imposed under this title, such person is liable to such consumers in an amount equal to the sum of any actual damages sustained by the consumers..., except that the total recovery shall not exceed the lesser of:
“(1) $500,000; or
“(2) 1 percent of the net worth of such person.”
But wait, was this legislation announced BEFORE Equifax announced that they had been breached, but AFTER they discovered the breach?
Your credit score is a figment of your own belief system, nothing more than a ruse by banks who must loan you even more money every year or they will go out of business. Don't believe for a second that a credit score means anything, because one of the big three have just proven its worthlessness.
And please, whatever else you do about this breach, and you should do SOMETHING, do not accept any free help or cleanup assistance package from this lazy corporation, for it's designed to make more money for them in the long run.