REACTION

Schumer calls for CEO, board of Equifax to testify.

Georgia lawmakers want a full investigation before a “rush to judgment” on penalties for Equifax,

WASHINGTON — The Senate’s top Democrat compared Atlanta-based credit bureau Equifax to the beleaguered company Enron on Thursday and called on Equifax’s board and CEO to step aside if they can’t commit to protecting the 143 million Amer- icans whose personal infor- mation was compromised in a whopping data breach.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, called for hearings to look into the matter, demanding that Equifax officials agree to testify before his chamber, as well as the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. He demanded that the com- pany comply with any recommendations arising from the government probes.

Schumer said the company also needed to notify their customers who were hacked, provide credit monitoring for 10 years and remove forced arbitration provisions from their terms of use of credit products. If executives do not agree to those terms, Schumer said, CEO Rick Smith and Equifax’s board of directors should be fired.

Schumer gave Equifax until next week to comply, and compared the credit

bureau to Enron, the gigan- tic energy company that declared bankruptcy in 2001, leaving thousands of employees with no savings because their retirement plans were based on Enron shares.

“To give Equifax a week to implement these things is overly generous to the peo-

ple who did horrible stuff and then, after it happened, did nothing, virtually nothing that showed that they had remorse,” he said. Georgia’s congressional

delegation also called for answers, but tread cautiously on the matter. Most said it’s too early to pursue some of the prescriptions advocated by Democrats, and said congressional probes should move forward first before lawmakers make any decisions on new cybersecurity laws, regulations or other disciplinary actions.

“If you make those deci- sions before you investigate, you’re going to do the wrong thing,” said U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga. “You don’t rush to judgment on Equi- fax. Equifax has got a lot of explaining to do, but you’ve got to give them the chance to explain before you rush to judgment.”

Representatives for Equi- fax did not respond to requests for comment.

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“Let’s get down to as much of the facts as we can and then let that guide our next actions,” said U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Pooler.

One of the most critical Georgia lawmakers was Democrat Hank Johnson of Lithonia, who said the hack proved the need for Congress to pass two bills he sponsored earlier this year related to data privacy and forced arbitration. “I will continue introducing these critical bills — fighting to ensure all consum- ers have the tools they need to protect themselves from identity theft and have their day in court,” he said. Many Georgia lawmakers have been boosters of the home state credit bureau in the past. The firm has donated thousands to local lawmakers in recent years. Isakson was by far its biggest recipient in 2016 as he ran for reelection. Equifax is “a longstanding Georgia company, and we want to make sure that they come out of this standing as tall as possible,” said Atlanta Democrat David Scott. “And the way to do that is to ... find out what happened and who’s responsible so that (it has) the confidence of the people.”

Equifax and a software company have blamed each other for a glitch that allowed hackers to steal the sensitive data.

Late Wednesday, Equifax

said that hackers breached a vulnerable spot in a U.S. website application called Apache Struts. But Apache Software Foundation said Thursday that it provided a patch for the software fault on March 7, well before Equifax said the security breach began in mid-May.

“In conclusion, the Equifax data compromise was due to their failure to install the security updates provided in a timely manner,” the foundation said. Analysts had suspected

the breach was related to the Apache Struts issue.

“At the end of the day, there’s humans building the software core ... and at the end of the day there is always vulnerability,” said Dimitri Sirota, CEO of BigID, a data security firm.