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Equifax says it identified 2.4 million U.S. consumers whose names and snippets of their driver's license numbers were stolen, adding to what is one of the largest and most sensitive data breaches on record.

The disclosure came Thursday, the same day Equifax announced a 40 percent rise in profit for the fourth quarter last year compared to the same period a year prior.

Equifax says that its latest breach-related finding came from an ongoing analysis of proprietary company records and information from an "external data provider."

The number of affected U.S. consumers now totals about 147.9 million, up from 145.5 million. The company says it will notify the victims and offer them prepaid identity theft protection and credit file...

Ransomware continues to pose a clear and present threat to businesses and consumers.

"From a business standpoint, the biggest threat, especially at the end of last year, was ransomware," says Adam Kujawa, director of malware intelligence at security firm Malwarebytes.

One measure of the problem is the many different types of ransomware available to would-be cybercriminals, be they based in their parents' basement or part of a larger organized crime ring.

ID Ransomware, a site that allows victims to upload a ransom note or encrypted file to identify the ransomware that crypto-locked them, now counts 542 ransomware families, starting with 4rw5w, 777 and 7ev3n, and ending with ZipLocker, Zipper and Zyklon.

That count represents a...

You may have April 17 marked on your calendar, but this year consider setting a new target date as Tax Day: Jan. 29.

The IRS will begin taking returns that day.

Tax professionals say it’s a mistake to wait to file until the April deadline because of concerns including the prevalence of tax return fraud as a result of the data breach at Equifax, one of the major credit reporting agencies. In 2017 cybercriminals were able to gain access to personal and financial information for about 143 million U.S. consumers from the agency's system.

“Tax ID theft is a huge problem,” said Steve Weisman, a law professor at Bentley University and expert on scams.

The good news is filing taxes can be easier and more automated than ever before. More...

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a data breach case that would have been the first of its kind to be reviewed by the high court.

The class action lawsuit against CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield is now headed back to a Washington federal trial court.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court "denied certiorari" in the CareFirst vs. Attitas case. This means the case goes back to court that dismissed CareFirst's request that the case against the insurer be thrown out, says Troy Giatras of Giatras Law Firm PLLC, one of the attorneys representing plaintiffs in the case. That clears the way for the case, filed on behalf of individuals whose data was breached, to potentially go to trial.

Attorney Jonathan Nace of the law firm Nadel and...

Facebook is facing a new controversy after some users say they've found records of phone calls and text messages in their personal files, but claim they never granted the social networking site permission to collect the data.

The findings come as Facebook is scrambling to counter perhaps one of the strongest backlashes against it in its 14-year history. The company is facing multiple privacy investigations in the U.S. and U.K. over the leak of personal information pertaining to as many as 60 million Facebook users to voter-profiling firm Cambridge Analytica (see Probes Begin as Facebook Slammed by Data Leak Blowback).

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged last week to improve privacy protections and be more transparent...