Republican Lawmakers Target Amazon, Capital One Over Data Breach

(Bloomberg) -- Republican lawmakers are requesting information about the massive data breach at Capital One Financial Corp., putting another spotlight onto the bank which last week disclosed one of the largest data breaches in history.

Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, the senior Republican on the House Oversight Committee, as well as Texas Representative Michael Cloud and North Carolina’s Mark Meadows, on Thursday addressed letters to the CEOs of Capital One and Amazon.com Inc., whose ex-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 Officer 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.

“Our committee has a long and bipartisan history of investigating data breaches in the government and private sector and we look forward to hearing more information about what happened from Capital One,” said Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat, in a statement through a spokeswoman.

The House Oversight Committee in 2017 opened an inquiry into Equifax Inc. 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.

To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Light in Washington at jlight8@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.