RESOLUTION
WHEREAS, as practically every aspect of private and public business is conducted and stored on virtual networks and warehouses, data breaches are occurring more frequently and with more potentially disastrous repercussions; and
WHEREAS, "hacks" and data breaches have a near constant strong hold on news headlines as cybercrime afflicts nations and industries throughout the globe; and
WHEREAS, for example, in 2013, the retail giant Target had its systems breached by a cyber-attack that affected more than 41 million customer payment card accounts, causing Target to pay out $18.5 million in settlement fees; and
WHEREAS, in 2014, Home Depot's systems were breached and 50 million cardholders were affected, resulting in Home Depot agreeing to pay at least $19.5 million to compensate those individuals; and
WHEREAS, Equifax is a consumer credit reporting agency that collects and aggregates information on over 800 million individual consumers and more than 88 million businesses worldwide; and
WHEREAS, Equifax then sells this information to third parties in the form of consumer credit reports, insurance reports, and other consumer demographic and analytics information; and
WHEREAS, Equifax also markets and sells its credit protection and identity theft monitoring services to the consumers whose personal information Equifax collects; and
WHEREAS, Congress enacted the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA) to ensure fair and accurate credit reporting, to promote efficiency in the banking system, and to protect consumer privacy; and
WHEREAS, Equifax as a credit reporting agency must abide by FRCA consumers privacy protection requirements of preventing inappropriate disclosure of private information by maintaining reasonable procedures to ensure third-party disclosures are made exclusively for permissible purposes; and
WHEREAS, on July 29, 2017 Equifax discovered evidence of a cyber security breach in their databases that stored confidential and private consumer information o...
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