I cannot for the life of me fathom how you think this is okay. I've worked in far less stringent environments than I would expect from Equifax and we would never have allowed a vulnerability like that to last a few days, let alone months.

This is indeed food for thought, and what I'm mentally chewing on is: why would you - or anyone - make such outlandish statements in a comment on HN? Are you seriously excusing them for reasons that effectively boil down to "this could have happened anywhere"? Do you really hold companies that hoard such sensitive data sets to that low a standard, and if so, why? Whyyyyyy?