Equifax Inc. suffered from a data breach of 143 million records of U.S. customers, on July 29^th 2017.

Cyber-attackers were able to access names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers as well as credit card numbers for about 209,000. This led to a decline in Equifax shares by more than 8 percent in after-hours trading.The intruders also accessed dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 consumers.

According to their website, the data breach occurred from mid-May till its discovery in July 2017, when actions were taken to stop the intrusion.

Data breaches have hit the three biggest U.S. credit-reporting companies, where in 2013 hackers gained illegal access to user information. Hackers were able to attain credit reports of high-profile people and posted them online.

Furthermore, Yahoo, whose web assets were acquired by Verizon Communications Inc. disclosed the occurrence of breaches, whereby at least 500 million customer accounts were compromised in 2014, and in 2013, a hack disrupted email addresses, account passwords and dates of birth of as many as 1 billion users.