The powerful chair of Britain’s parliamentary treasury committee wants Equifax, the US reporting agency, to explain why it took the company more than a month to notify UK users of a data breach affecting 15.2 million citizens.
According to Reuters, Chair of the House of Commons’ Treasury Committee Nicky Morgan also wrote to the UK’s financial regulator (the FCA) in a bid to find out whether Equifax was in violation of its terms to operate in the country.
Morgan also asked the FCA if it had the necessary authority to encourage the firm to provide compensation to customers in the UK.
It comes after Equifax revealed that 15.2m records of British citizens were involved in the cyber attack – including the sensitive data of what it claims were 693,665 people.
The data of British citizens allegedly accessed by hackers included user credentials, credit accounts, partial credit card details and driver license numbers.
Little over a month ago, the firm first said it had been the victim of a huge data breach, which affected approximately 143 million individuals, mostly in the US.
It did, however, say at the time that an unspecified number of UK and Canadian residents were also affected.