On Friday, 13 October, Equifax Ltd was fined £11 million by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for its role in one of the biggest cyberattacks in history. The personal details of 146 million people worldwide, mainly in the US, were accessed during the breach. The FCA stated that the hackers could also access the personal data of 13.8 million UK consumers as the data was stored on company servers in the US. Equifax Ltd had outsourced data such as names, dates of birth, Equifax membership login details, partially exposed credit card details, and addresses. The FCA deemed the cyberattack and unauthorised access to data entirely preventable and exposed UK consumers to the risk of financial crime. Equifax stated that they have cooperated fully with the FCA throughout the long-running investigation and invested over $1.5 billion in security and technology transformation.
In 2018, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined Equifax £500,000, the maximum penalty allowed at the time under the Data Protection Act 1998. Then, in 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission, along with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and 50 states and territories, reached a settlement of at least $575 million.
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