WASHINGTON — Leaders of House and Senate committees want Capital One and Amazon to explain to Congress how a hacker accessed personal information from more than 100 million Capital One credit applications.
The incident was the latest massive data breach at a large company.
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, asked for a staff-level briefing by Aug. 15 on the breach that was reported late Monday.
The chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee said the committee will look into the matter. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, plans legislation that would establish new data safeguards for consumers.
“I have concerns about all aspects of this,” Crapo told reporters this week. “We want to understand how this happened, how other breaches happened … and we want to know how vulnerabilities (appear) in systems and figure out what we must do to deal with them at a policy level.”
In a letter Thursday to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Jordan and other Republicans on the House committee note that Capital One data was stored on a cloud service provided by Amazon Web Services. The suspected hacker , Paige Thompson, is a former Amazon software engineer.
FBI agents arrested Thompson on Monday for allegedly obtaining personal information from more than 100 million Capital One credit applications, including roughly 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers. There is no evidence the data was sold or distributed to others.
The House members also want Capital One to describe the scope of the incident and the company’s response.
Spokesmen for Capital One and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
