Republican lawmakers are requesting information about the massive data breach at Capital One Financial, putting another spotlight onto the bank, which last week disclosed one of the largest data breaches in history.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the senior Republican on the House Oversight Committee, and Reps. Michael Cloud of Texas and Mark Meadows of North Carolina, on Thursday addressed letters to the CEOs of Capital One and Amazon.com. A former Amazon employee allegedly stole the data.
The letter requested staff-level briefings on the breach and the companies’ responses by Aug. 15.
In their letter to Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, the congressmen wrote that the committee “may carefully examine the consequences of this breach” in light of large federal projects Amazon is hoping to participate in. The company is a prime contender to win a massive cloud-services contract for the Pentagon.
The lawmakers also requested information on Amazon Web Services’ security protocols that protect personal and government data.
Capital One this week said a former Amazon cloud-services employee illegally accessed data from about 100 million people in the U.S., taking advantage of a misconfigured firewall. The information included personal data such as names, addresses, and credit scores. The bank said about 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers were also accessed.
The House Oversight Committee in 2017 opened an inquiry into Equifax after the credit-reporting company disclosed a cyber breach that affected nearly 150 million Americans. The company in July reached a settlement of as much as $700 million with federal and state regulators to resolve their investigations.
