Equifax's European unit confirmed today that a file containing 15.2M United Kingdom records dating from between 2011 and 2016 was 'illegally compromised." The company said in a blog post, "Regrettably this file contained data relating to actual consumers as well as sizeable test datasets, duplicates and spurious fields. Equifax has brought every analytical tool, technique and data asset it has available to bear in order to 'fill in the blanks' and establish actual consumer identities and attribute a current home address to them.

This complete, we have been able to place consumers into specific risk categories and define the services to offer them in order to protect against those risks and send letters to offer them Equifax and third-party safeguards with instructions on how to get started. This work has enabled us to confirm that we will need to contact 693,665 consumers by post. Details are set out in the box below. The balance of the 14.5m records potentially compromised may contain the name and date of birth of certain UK consumers. Whilst this does not introduce any significant risk to these people Equifax is sorry that this data may have been accessed."