Equifax has been fined £11 million by Britian’s financial watchdog for the 2017 cyber security breach.
Equifax suffered one of the largest cyber security breach in 2017 which affected 147.9 million US consumers. The UK arm of the credit reporting firm, Equifax Ltd, had 13.8 million UK consumers that were also impacted as their data were outsourced to the parent US company for processing. Hackers had stolen, names, dates of birth, phone number, partially exposed credit card details and residential addresses of the UK consumers. The British Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said that the cyber-attack and unauthorised access to UK consumer data was entirely preventable. It said that Equifax did not treat its relationship with its parent company as outsourcing, and as a result, did not provide sufficient oversight of how data it was sending was properly managed and protected. There were known weakness in the parent company’s data security systems and the company did not take appropriate action in response to protect its UK customer data. As a result, the FCA fined Equifax Ltd for failing to manage and monitor the security of UK consumer data that it outsourced to its US-based parent company. The fine amount was discounted by 30% as Equifax had agreed to resolve the matter and cooperate to a high level with the financial watchdog.
https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/equifax-ltd-fine-cyber-security-breach
https://therecord.media/uk-fines-equifax-millions-for-2017-data-breach
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/uk-watchdog-fines-equifax-for-role-in-cyber-breach-601233
This segment was created for the It’s 5:05 podcast