How Privacy Enhancing Technology Could Have Saved TransUnion’s 4.4 Million Victims

Privacy Enhancing Technology was built for this moment. TransUnion just proved why.

When ShinyHunters and Scattered Spider orchestrated their campaign against 91+ global organizations including TransUnion; they exposed something far more dangerous than Social Security numbers. They showed the sophistication of hacking groups working together and the damage they can cause at scale.

The Anatomy of a “Perfect” Storm: Why Traditional Security Failed

On July 28, 2025, TransUnion, one of the three giants controlling America’s credit infrastructure, fell victim to what security experts now recognize as the most sophisticated supply chain attack in history. The breach wasn’t just about TransUnion. It was the culmination of a coordinated attack.

The attack, orchestrated by ShinyHunters (UNC6040) in partnership with Scattered Spider, targeted over 91 organizations worldwide through a methodical Salesforce campaign. The victim list reads like a Fortune 500 directory: Google, Adidas, Allianz Life, LVMH, Pandora, Coca-Cola, Hawaiian Airlines, Air France-KLM, and now TransUnion.

Here’s what makes this different: attackers didn’t just exploit perimeter vulnerabilities. Instead, they used voice phishing to convince employees to install and authorize malicious apps disguised as legitimate tools. This of them as mini Trojan horses with devastating effects. Once inside, the hackers quickly pulled millions of records from their victims.

The horrifying truth? They found exactly what they expected: unencrypted data sitting in clear text, available to be taken.

Why Privacy Enhancing Technology Matters: Addressing the Fundamental Flaw

So IT security professionals make the same deadly assumption: “Our data is encrypted at rest, so we’re protected.”

This thinking cost TransUnion 4.4 million victims and explains why 1.7 billion individuals received breach notifications in 2024, a 312% increase from 2023.

Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) is needed because this binary approach to data security is fundamentally broken. Legacy encryption ensures that data is either locked away (encrypted at rest) or wide open (decrypted in use). There’s no middle ground.

TransUnion’s data was stored on a third-party application serving their consumer support operations. The moment that application became active, processing queries, generating reports, handling customer requests, the encryption vanished. The data sat in clear text, fully accessible to anyone with system access.

This is exactly what Privacy Enhancing Technologies solve. Unlike legacy encryption strategies, PET keeps data encrypted all the time, including when it is in use. When attackers break in, they find (at best) data hashes that are just gibberish. There’s no valuable information available to steal.

The market knows this is needed. That’s why Zama became the world’s first fully homomorphic encryption blockchain unicorn at a $1+ billion valuation. That’s why Microsoft, IBM, and Google have invested billions in PET infrastructure. That’s why GDPR fines reached $5.88 billion specifically targeting insufficient privacy protections.

How Donoma Seshat Delivers Privacy Enhancing Technology Without Compromise

Imagine if the ShinyHunters had broken into TransUnion’s systems and found… nothing.

With Seshat’s Privacy Enhancing Technology, those 4.4 million records would have remained encrypted even while being processed, queried, and analyzed. The customer support operations would have continued seamlessly, but attackers would have extracted only encrypted gibberish.

Here’s what would have happened instead:

Traditional Approach (What Actually Happened):

Attackers gain OAuth access via social engineering
Customer data sits in clear text during processing
4.4 million records rapidly stolen
Years of identity theft and fraud ahead for victims

With Seshat’s Privacy Enhancing Technology:

Attackers gain the same OAuth access
All queries return homomorphically encrypted data, invisible to the attackers
No usable information visible, only mathematical noise
Operations continue uninterrupted
Attack fails, attackers move on to easier targets

Unlike legacy encryption technologies that are slow, expensive and require specialized hardware; Seshat’s breakthrough software-based design delivers unparalleled security powered with speed, scalability and affordability. Seshat works on standard infrastructure with minimal application changes.

This is why Seshat represents the next generation of Privacy Enhancing Technology: functionality without compromise.

The Math Behind Privacy Enhancing Technology

Cost of TransUnion’s breach: Conservative estimates suggest $50-100 million in remediation, legal costs, and regulatory fines.

Cost of implementing Seshat: A fraction of a single breach of your organization.

Cost of ignoring Privacy Enhancing Technology: Your company’s survival.

The PET market didn’t grow because of hype. It grew because organizations like TransUnion prove the alternative is existential risk.

The breach cost calculation is straightforward:

Average data breach cost: $4.88 million (and rising)
Healthcare breaches: $10.93 million average
Financial services breaches: Often exceed $100 million
Regulatory fines: GDPR penalties reached $5.88 billion in 2024 alone

Against this backdrop, Privacy Enhancing Technology isn’t an expense; it’s risk avoidance with measurable ROI.

The Supply Chain Revolution: Why PETs Must Come Into Play

The ShinyHunters campaign represents a new attack paradigm that traditional security cannot address. Recent campaigns have targeted Salesloft customers through compromised OAuth tokens, affecting over 700 organizations. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group warns this could be the foundation for much larger supply chain attacks.

Every third-party integration in your stack is a potential entry point. Every API connection is a possible backdoor. Every vendor storing your data is a single social engineering call away from catastrophic exposure.

With 1.7 billion individuals receiving breach notifications in 2024 (a 312% increase) the question isn’t whether you’ll be breached. It’s whether your data will be useful when you are.

This is precisely why the Privacy Enhancing Technology market exists. Financial services lead PET adoption with 30% market share because they understand the math. Healthcare organizations deploy PET to protect patient privacy while enabling research. Government agencies use PET for national security applications.

The convergence is undeniable:

77% of executives admit their systems lack PET technology
20 US states now mandate privacy-by-design in new legislation
$500+ billion in global breach costs in 2024 alone

Organizations that deploy Privacy Enhancing Technology now will capture disproportionate advantage as privacy-preserving computation becomes as fundamental as encryption at rest is today.

The Privacy Enhancing Technology Advantage: Zero-Value Hacks

Seshat doesn’t just protect your data—it eliminates its value to attackers. When data remains homomorphically encrypted during processing, breaches become meaningless. There’s nothing to ransom, nothing to sell on dark markets, nothing to embarrass your company with on the evening news. This approach addresses the fundamental problem every CISO faces: traditional security focuses on keeping attackers out, but PET makes data worthless even when they get in.

Are You Ready for the Privacy Enhancing Technology Era?

Ask yourself: If ShinyHunters gained access to your systems right now, through a vendor, a phishing attack, or a compromised OAuth token, what would they find? If the answer is anything other than “homomorphically encrypted data they can’t use,” you’re one social engineering call away from becoming the next TransUnion.

TransUnion is learning this lesson the hard way. Four and a half million people are now paying the price with years of credit monitoring and identity theft risk.

The choice is binary: deploy Privacy Enhancing Technology now or explain to your customers why their data is being sold on the dark web; subjecting them to significant risk and financial loss.

Don’t let your organization and your customers become the next victims.

Ready to join the Privacy Enhancing Technology revolution? Seshat’s breakthrough homomorphic level encryption keeps your most sensitive information protected even during active use. Contact us to learn how continuous encryption can turn your biggest liability into your strongest competitive advantage.

Schedule a demo today—before the attackers schedule their next call.

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