As the Apache Foundation pointed out earlier this week, it reported CVE-2017-5638 in March 2017. Doubt us? Here's the NIST notification that mentions it as being notified on March 10th.

Equifax was breached in “mid-May” 2017, realised it in July and got around to telling the world in Early September. If we take “mid-May” as the 15th of the month, Equifax had nine working weeks in which to apply the patch.

That its data breach was entirely avoidable is not the end of Equifax's woes, as the new Progress Update also reveals that “Due to the high volume of security freeze requests, we experienced temporary technical difficulties and our system was offline for approximately an hour at 5PM ET on September 13, 2017 to address this issue.”

The company also appears to have suffered another data breach, this time in Argentina where its Bryan Krebs reports “an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”