Equifax AI-enabled Security: Transforming The Organization’s Cyber Defenses

Story highlights:

• Outpacing the threat landscape: Equifax has upgraded its security operations with custom AI that automatically triages alerts, drafts code fixes, and helps defend against 19.8 million cyber threats daily.  

• Enabling rapid, secure innovation: As Equifax accelerates AI-powered product development, it is prioritizing safe innovation by anchoring its internal AI controls to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, automated evaluation gates, and human-in-the-loop oversight. 

As businesses continue to face mounting and more sophisticated cyber threats, Equifax is optimizing its defenses by integrating AI-enabled security throughout the business. The organization is automating complex security operations to fight off daily attacks, while simultaneously ensuring its workforce can safely leverage new technologies to drive business growth and product innovation.

The New Threat Landscape

Equifax takes a proactive approach to cybersecurity, deploying advanced AI tools to accelerate threat detection and response. The sheer volume of modern threats requires a highly optimized defense. In 2025 alone, the company blocked 19.8 million cyber threats each day, a 30% increase from the prior year.

To handle this influx, Equifax deployed specialized AI triage agents to manage routine alerts, freeing human analysts to focus on complex threats. This automation is helping auto-resolve nearly 50% of all Security Operations Center (SOC) incident tickets. Elevating this capability from threat detection to proactive engineering, Equifax uses a custom AI system to analyze flaws in its software building blocks. The AI automatically drafts the necessary code repairs and sends them directly to developers for a final review. This successfully handles over 213,000 findings annually without slowing the delivery of products that improve consumer financial health.

"When you’re dealing with a consistent increase in alert volume, success is defined by speed,” shared Jeremy Koppen, Equifax Global CISO during a recent interview on the Bloomberg News “Taking Stock” show. “We use AI to analyze incoming data, conduct the initial triage, and instantly escalate the biggest risks to our environment. It accelerates our ability to identify vulnerabilities and prioritize the highest-impact remediation actions, such as a patch or a system configuration."

As AI technology is rapidly deployed across the industry, it also presents new opportunities for attackers to exploit. To proactively counter this, Equifax introduced an AI-powered platform that delivers personalized security training to its global workforce. This training is continuously validated by over 240,000 phishing simulations, which increase in difficulty commensurately to match the evolving threat environment.

Securely Implementing AI for Internal Use

As Equifax builds more AI-powered products, it is leveraging AI to conduct the architectural reviews needed to get those innovations to market faster. For example, an internal AI advisory assistant now helps architects analyze designs instantly, reducing security consult resolution times by 61%.

Equifax has integrated the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework (NIST AI RMF) directly into its broader NIST-aligned Security and Privacy Controls Framework, ensuring a comprehensive, holistic approach to risk management.

"Implementing AI requires strict guardrails. By combining risk frameworks, like the NIST AI RMF, with our existing security and privacy governance, we can monitor model usage and ensure it consistently meets our controls," added Koppen. 

The company’s protocols are designed to empower employees to innovate as builders while maintaining active safety nets. This includes ensuring that, for high-stakes use cases, it enforces human-in-the-loop approvals and automated kill switches with instant rollback capabilities. 

Equifax remains committed to continuing to evolve its security defenses, relying on in-house AI experts, and ensuring that its AI systems are used in a transparent, trustworthy, and secure manner to provide benefits to customers and consumers.

Learn more about how Equifax is using AI to enhance security in its 2025 Security Annual Report.