Equifax rout too stout?
Analysts say, buy!
Harangued on Main Street, Equifax is finding a little bit of love onWall Street.
After watching investors beat the tar out of Equifax shares over the last five trading days — knocking the stock down31percent— analysts are recommending shares of the credit bureau at the highest levels since 2009.
The recommendations come even as the company releases more damaging information and customers dust off their pitchforks.
Equifax shares closed Thursday at $96.66, down 2.4 percent. They were trading down another 1.2 percent after hours.
On Thursday, Wall Street had a muted response to revelations that Equifax appears to have waited months to fix a well-known security vulnerability in its software, enabling hackers to compromise the personal information of as many as 143 million US consumers.
“Weknowthat criminals exploited a US website application vulnerability,” the company said in a blog post late Wednesday, confirming that the flaw had affected its opensourcesoftware, called Apache Struts.
The Post first reported on Friday that Equifax told analysts that hackers were able to break into their systems via a vulnerability in ApacheStruts.
Theinformationwasembarrassing, and the stock ended the day 2.4 percent lower, to $96.66.
Wall Street analysts, however, shrugged. Eighty-one percent of them recommend that investors buy the stock, the most in eight years. The rest recommendthey“hold.”
“I remain of the view that consumers in financial institutions andtheir industry clients benefit from having more credit bureaus,” Jeffrey Meuler, analyst at Baird, told ThePost.
“I don’t think this is an existential event,” Brett Horn, an analyst at Morningstar, said earlier this week.
Separately Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission said it has openedaninvestigation into the Equifax data breach, arare public disclosure that sent shares tumbling to their lowest level in more than two years.
Equifax was hacked from May until July 29, when it was discoveredbythecompany, according to a public statement fromthecredit bureau.
OnWednesday, Equifax confirmedthat the specific vulnerability dates back to March.
Apache had made multiple patches, orfixes, available to its customers for free after discovering security problemssix months ago — raising the possibility that the hack could havebeenpreventedifEquifax hadjust downloadedthepatch.