Fintech Feminists

CHAPTER SEVENROOT OF PROBLEMS

In 2017, consumer credit rating giant Equifax suffered one of the country’s largest and most headline-grabbing data breaches, exposing the personal information of 147 million US citizens, roughly 40% of the population, to hackers.¹ Since then, data breaches have been escalating for several years, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down. Year after year, as our society’s digital footprints grow, we witnessed several incidents involving the theft of sensitive information. Companies and organizations across various industries and sizes have fallen victim to data breaches, resulting in millions of dollars in fraudulent damages for US businesses and consumers.

Another notable – and more recent – example is the widely publicized T-Mobile data breach in 2023.² Prominent tech companies like Dell and Dropbox have also suffered data breaches in 2024. Dell notified customers – including myself – via email on 9 May 2024, that 49 million records were hacked following an attack on its portal, while Dropbox informed users on 1 May 2024 in a blog post that its service had been accessed by a threat actor, potentially exposing data such as email addresses, phone numbers, and passwords.³

In late May 2024, Evolve Bank & Trust, a popular financial institution for fintech start-ups, announced a ransomware attack by the criminal organization LockBit, which gained access to their systems when an employee inadvertently clicked on a malicious internet link.⁴ The data ...