Equifax Inc. is an American multinational consumer credit reporting agency headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and is one of the three largest consumer credit reporting agencies, along with Experian and TransUnion. Equifax collects and aggregates information on over 800 million individual consumers and more than 88 million businesses worldwide. In addition to credit and demographic data and services to business, Equifax sells credit monitoring and fraud prevention services directly to consumers.
Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and affiliated companies, commonly shortened to Nationwide, is a group of large U.S. insurance and financial services companies based in Columbus, Ohio. The company also operates regional headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona and Des Moines, Iowa. Nationwide currently has approximately 25,000 employees, and is ranked No. 75 in the 2024 Fortune 500 list. Nationwide is currently ranked No. 21 in Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For".
CafePress, Inc. is an American online retailer of stock and user-customized on-demand products. The company was founded in San Mateo, California, but is now headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, where its production facility is also located. In 2001, CafePress.com won the People's Voice Webby Award in the Commerce category.
Sheetz, Inc. is an American chain of convenience stores and coffee shops owned by the Sheetz family. The stores sell custom food, beverages and convenience store items, with all locations having offered 24/7 service since the 1980s. Nearly all of them sell gasoline; a few locations are full-scale truck stops, including showers and a laundromat. Sheetz's headquarters is in Altoona, Pennsylvania, with their corporate offices located there as well, with over 700 stores located in Central and Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina, with plans to expand to Michigan.
TJ Maxx is an American department store chain, selling at prices generally lower than other major similar stores. It has more than 1,000 stores in the United States, making it one of the largest clothing retailers in the country. TJ Maxx is the flagship chain of the TJX Companies. It sells men's, women's and children's apparel and shoes, toys, bath and beauty products, accessories, jewelry, and home products ranging from furniture and decor to housewares and kitchen utensils.
Rax Roast Beef is a regional U.S. fast food restaurant chain specializing in roast beef sandwiches. The company has been through many iterations, declaring bankruptcy more than once, rising to as many as 504 locations in 38 U.S. states in the 1980s and falling to fewer than 20 locations on more than one occasion. As of 2024, Rax is based in Ironton, Ohio, and has only six franchisee-owned restaurants still in operation in three states.
A data breach, also known as data leakage, is "the unauthorized exposure, disclosure, or loss of personal information".
Heather Pick was an American television news anchor as well as an activist on behalf of breast cancer awareness and juvenile diabetes. She began her career in newscasting at WREX-TV in Rockford, Illinois before moving in 2002 to Columbus, Ohio where she was the morning and noon news anchor for WBNS-TV.
Columbus, Ohio has a generally strong and diverse economy based on education, insurance, banking, fashion, defense, aviation, food, logistics, steel, energy, medical research, health care, hospitality, retail, and technology.
Bread Financial Holdings, Inc. is an American publicly-traded provider of loyalty and marketing services, such as private label credit cards, coalition loyalty programs, and direct marketing, derived from the capture and analysis of transaction-rich data.
The 2011 PlayStation Network outage was the result of an "external intrusion" on Sony's PlayStation Network and Qriocity services, in which personal details from approximately 77 million accounts were compromised and prevented users of PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles from accessing the service. The attack occurred between April 17 and April 19, 2011, forcing Sony to deactivate the PlayStation Network servers on April 20. The outage lasted 23 days.
RiteRug Flooring, formerly Rite Rug, is a flooring retailer headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. RiteRug Flooring's current headquarters, distribution center, wholesale and outlet showroom are located in a 150,000 space in the Whitehall area of the city. They sell floor coverings in the Columbus area. The company had $425 million in revenue in 2021.
In 2013 and 2014, the American web services company Yahoo was subjected to two of the largest data breaches on record. Although Yahoo was aware, neither breach was revealed publicly until September 2016.
Okta, Inc. is an American identity and access management company based in San Francisco. It provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure user authentication into applications, and for developers to build identity controls into applications, website, web services, and devices. It was founded in 2009 and had its initial public offering in 2017, reaching a valuation of over $6 billion.
Kaira Sturdivant Rouda is an American author and businesswoman. She is best known for her psychological suspense novels, including Best Day Ever and All the Difference. Her novel, The Favorite Daughter, was released in May 2019.
ShinyHunters is a black-hat criminal hacker group that is believed to have formed in 2020 and is said to have been involved in numerous data breaches. The stolen information is often sold on the dark web.
In September 2022, Australian telecommunications company Optus suffered a data breach that affected up to 10 million current and former customers comprising a third of Australia's population. Information was illegally obtained, including names, dates of birth, home addresses, telephone numbers, email contacts, and numbers of passports and driving licences. Conflicting claims about how the breach happened were made; Optus presented it as a complicated attack on its systems while an Optus insider and the Australian Government said a human error caused a vulnerability in the company's API. A ransom notice asking for A$1,500,000 to stop the data from being sold online was issued. After a few hours, the data thieves deleted the ransom notice and apologised for their actions.
