NEW YORK (AP) — Credit agency Equifax traced the theft of sensitive information about 143 million Americans to a software flaw that could have been fixed well before the burglary occurred, further undermining its credibility as the guardian of personal data that can easily be used for identity theft.

Equifax identified a weakness in an open-source software package called Apache Struts as the technological crack that allowed hackers to heist Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses and full legal names from a massive database maintained primarily for lenders.

SECURITY FOR DUMMIES

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