Warren wants investigation of Equifax data breach
Citing Equifax’s “delayed and lackluster response,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called Friday for a more thorough government investigation of the recent data breach at the creditreporting agency and asked Equifax’s competitors to provide information on their data protection measures.
Warren introduced a bill that would prevent credit-reporting agencies from profiting off of consumers’ information during a credit freeze and allow consumers an additional free credit report after the Equifax breach.
“Equifax has failed to provide the necessary information describing exactly how this happened, and exactly how your security systems failed,” she wrote in a letter to Equifax.
“Equifax’s initial efforts to provide customers information did nothing to clarify the situation and actually appeared to be efforts to hoodwink them into waiving important legal rights.”
She also sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office to request an investigation into consumer data security.
Her letter comes shortly after the government agencies responsible for consumer protection announced their own investigations of the breach. The Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said this week they will investigate the hacker attack on Equifax’s data systems that compromised personal information on an estimated 143 million U.S. consumers.
The hackers also gained access to credit-card numbers for roughly 209,000 consumers, as well as certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 consumers.
Beyond a detailed review of Equifax’s breach, the GAO review should include a description of current legal and regulatory structure in overseeing credit-reporting agencies and a summary of the rights of consumers with regard to the agencies, Warren wrote. Warren also urged the GAO to review the companies’ interaction with federal regulators and determine what role the credit-reporting agencies played in federal programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.