But there are protections against this, such as HSTS. I would expect someone with as much sensitive information as Equifax to have HSTS + HPKP pinned into the major browsers. Their server should never even receive an HTTP request. It's just unrivaled incompetence.
Normally, people in marketing don’t write URLs by hand. They copy them and check that they look nice or have a generator make them for them.
So, how did they copy an http url instead of https because they website should have redirected them to https before processing the request (and I just hope that their internal network isn’t compromised).