Warren’s Regulatory Expansion Is Wrong Answer to Equifax Breach: New at Reason

In September, we learned that Equifax had suffered a massive data breach that exposed the personal information—including names, addresses, birthdates and Social Security numbers—of 145 million Americans. It was the latest in a string of cybersecurity breaches in recent years. The frequency of such attacks — with other prominent examples including breaches of systems belonging to Target, eBay, Yahoo and Home Depot—demonstrates the complexity of securing sensitive information in the internet age.

If there’s one thing that all these breaches have taught us, it’s that cybersecurity is hard. There’s no easy legislative fix, and knee-jerk calls for new regulations on each industry that suffers from a breach offer no substitute for improving cybersecurity.

Nevertheless, a mere week after the Equifax breach, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, (D-Mass.), had the issue all sorted out. She introduced her legislative remedy, the Freedom from Equifax Exploitation, or FREE, Act, claiming that it “is a first step toward reforming the broken credit reporting industry.”

The implication is that this incident is unique among all other cybersecurity breaches in that Equifax and the credit industry at large are the source of the problem. The truth is much more mundane. Equifax fell victim to an unpatched vulnerability installed by a contractor, and now a politician is exploiting the issue to increase government control over an industry, writes Veronique de Rugy.

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