All the best locks in the world doesn't help one iota if your attack is to get the janitor to open the gate for you. The compromised component at Equifax was t

All the best locks in the world doesn't help one iota if your attack is to get the janitor to open the gate for you. The compromised component at Equifax was the running application which is built to retrieve data from the database - it knows how to log in to the database and do whatever decryption is required to retrieve data. You don't particularly need to compromise passwords or encryption keys or whatever, because the application will just use them for you. Encryption protects against compromising the server itself either physically or at the OS level, which is not nothing, but also doesn't help if you have an underpaid janitor with a gambling problem with all the keys in his pocket guarding the loading bays out back.