Scammers keep trying to sell fake Equifax facts

Enlarge / This guy would also like to sell you some stolen Equifax data. (credit: Lyda Hill Texas Collection / Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress)

Last week, someone attempted to execute a poorly conceived digital cash grab by setting up a "Dark Web" page on the Tor network, claiming responsibility for the data breach at credit reporting bureau Equifax. The page demanded a ransom of 600 bitcoin and threatened to publicly release all of the data if payment was not made by September 15. But a misconfiguration of the services used for the site allowed security researchers to identify its hosting service, and the scam was quickly shut down.

Now, a new Dark Web site has been set up by a group calling itself "Equihax," claiming to have data from the Equifax breach. But this time, the scammers went further in trying to bolster their claim, posting what they claimed were samples of stolen data and screenshots from what appears at first glance to be a Web console for an Equifax instance of IBM WebSphere. And, according to their .onion page, the scammers are offering individual bits of the Equifax data for sale-or to publish it all if the world pays "600 BTC or 8400 ETH," they say.

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