The British arm of credit reporting company Equifax was fined £11,164,400 (about $13.6 million) by a British regulator on Friday for allowing hackers to access personal information millions of people in 2017.
Around 13.8 million UK consumers were affected by the incident, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, and it is one of the biggest data breaches of all time. In the United States, approximately 148 million people had their data exposed in this attack.
THE guard dog found that Equifax Ltd, the company’s UK business, exposed data because it outsourced processing to servers run by its US parent, Equifax Inc. The information affected included “names, dates of birth, phone numbers, Equifax member login information, credit card details partially exposed.” , and residential addresses,” the FCA said.
Equifax Ltd did not discover that UK consumers’ data had been accessed “until 6 weeks after Equifax Inc discovered the hack”, the FCA said. The British branch was only informed of the incident “about five minutes before the American parent company announced it.” This meant that Equifax was unable to deal with complaints received when the incident was announced and caused delays in communicating with UK customers,” the watchdog said.
Company officials told reporters that they had fully cooperated with the FCA investigation and invested $1.5 billion in improving cybersecurity since the attack.
Equifax Inc. agreed in 2019 to pay at least $575 million to settle allegations about the incident brought by U.S. state and federal regulators. The American government has accused four Chinese government hackers to lead the attack.
In 2018, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office fined separately Equifax Ltd £500,000 (then approximately $668,000) for breaching data protection rules due to the 2017 incident.
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Joe Warminsky
Joe Warminsky is the editor-in-chief of Recorded Future News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and writer in the Washington, DC area. Most recently, he helped lead CyberScoop for over five years. Before that, he was a digital editor at WAMU 88.5, NPR’s Washington affiliate, and he spent more than a decade editing congressional coverage for CQ Roll Call.