Credit reporting company
Equifax, known for suffering from one of the largest customer data
breaches to date, has partnered with blockchain company Oasis Labs to
build a Know Your Customer (KYC) solution.

Equifax and Oasis said on Oct. 26 that the latter would be building a decentralized identity management and KYC solution for the industry on Oasis’ platform which will leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from Equifax to help with checks and user identification.

The
announcement made no mention of the exact technology which will
underpin this offering and Cointelegraph’s request for comment was not
immediately responded to by either company.

Both firms believe
there hasn’t been a KYC solution tailored to Web3 with “strong privacy
protection” and their proposed offering is set to address this gap by
issuing anonymized KYC credentials to individuals’ wallets.

This
credential will be continuously updated according to the announcement
and Oasis pledges its “privacy-preserving capabilities” will ensure data
is processed in confidence whilst maintaining a trail on the company's
blockchain.

Web3 firms offering similar solutions based around
decentralized identity are Dock and Quadrata with each offering a
product built around decentralized identity.

The partnership could
have some Web3 natives concerned considering the significant data
breach Equifax suffered in 2017. Around 163 million worldwide private
records were compromised with 148 million being U.S. citizens making it
the 13th largest data breach in U.S. history according to cybersecurity company UpGuard.

Related: Zero-knowledge KYC could solve the privacy vs compliance conundrum — VC partner

Attackers
targeted a third-party web portal with a known vulnerability that was
patched but Equifax had failed to update to the latest version, the
hackers gained access to the firms' servers for around two and a half
months all the while siphoning millions of records containing sensitive
information.

It was reported that Equifax spent $1.4 billion on
legal fees and strengthening its security posture following the
incident. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau issued a $700 million fine in July 2019 which the firm settled.

source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/equifax-known-for-huge-data-breach-is-building-a-web3-kyc-solution