Data security

Equifax observed an increasingly well-worn ritual of scandal-ridden firms by jettisoning CEO Richard Smith: apologize, promise to do better in the future, and sacrifice your top executive in the hopes it will ward off action by Congress and regulators.

Inevitably, Equifax’s CEO Richard Smith has left his post. For the credit bureau's sake, let's hope it has a long-term plan that's better than promoting from within.

Richard Smith has resigned from the embattled Atlanta credit reporting company and will be replaced by Paulino do Rego Barros Jr., a seven-year company veteran. Board member Mark Feidler, a former telecom executive, was named nonexecutive chairman.

The accounting firm says only a "very few" clients were affected by the cyberattack; former CEO Mike Cagney's wife, the lender's chief tech officer, is leaving.

The auditing and consulting firm said Monday that it’s currently informing the clients affected and has notified governmental authorities after it became aware of the incident.

The recent Equifax hack isn't believed to be an inside job, but it may give life to a new rash of insider thefts if fraudsters seek to do more with the data they obtained in the breach.

Ironically, the credit bureau’s rise was built on promise to safeguard customers’ most sensitive information; bank to build global ops center in Warsaw.

After Equifax disclosed a devastating data breach, much of the attention focused on whether the company did everything it could in response. But the scary truth may be that this is the sort of incident that goes beyond a single company's ability to fix.

A year ago, then-Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf testified before two committees. It went so poorly Stumpf later resigned, and the bank is still struggling to repair the damage. Here's how Equifax CEO Richard Smith can avoid the same fate.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is broadening her probe into the data breach to look at whether the company should have disclosed the breach sooner and if it plans to claw back compensation.

SourceMedia's PayThink conference is an annual gathering of key decision-makers in the financial services and payments industries. This year's event, which took place in Phoenix this September, brought several key ideas to light.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council meets Friday to discuss removing the label from the now shrunken insurer; Senate Banking Committee to hear Richard Smith on October 4.

Summit Credit Union in Madison, Wis., has filed what's believed to be the first lawsuit by a financial institution in connection with the massive data breach.

The hearings before the Senate Banking Committee have high stakes for both companies, as lawmakers are expected to ask the CEOs whether they should be fired.

Data breaches and payment hacks require not only tech measures, but crisis management. Had Equifax gotten out in front of the story, particularly during the slow news period of August, it would have earned kudos and perhaps mitigated some of the public scrutiny.

Did hackers access the credit bureau's computers two months earlier than the company first thought?; the Fed's decision to start unwinding its balance sheet should raise rates and boost bank profits.

Historically, the industry has placed much greater emphasis on preventing fraud at the point of transaction without doing enough to stop fraudulent account openings, writes Melissa Townsley, co-founder and CEO of GIACT systems.

Consumers and merchants in a digital ecosystem are changing the way people interact with each other and machines, changing payments and requiring an updated approach to security, according to Mastercard.

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Wells Fargo’s treatment of customers was “egregious and unacceptable," hinting that more regulatory action was likely.

Equifax's data breach may be the most serious, given that it covered 143 million consumers and involved reams of confidential information, but it wasn't the largest. Following are the biggest to date.