The US home improvement retailer later paid a US$17.5 million settlement with 46 US states and the Federal Government over the incident. "I had a bit of a blueprint of what to expect, but Equifax was a completely different ballgame," says Farshchi, Equifax's chief information security officer, who has filled senior cyber security roles at Visa, Time Warner, NASA and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In March, 2017, hackers had stolen terabytes of customer data from Equifax's IT systems, including names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers, and drivers' licence numbers for up to 143 million Americans. Here was a company responsible for verifying the financial health of a large section of the US population having failed to properly secure their information. The Equifax data breach ultimately started with an insecure consumer complaints web portal, but spiralled in scope due to multiple security failures.