Senate Democrats Introduce Bill Setting Up New Cyber Office at FTC

The FTC would be charged with creating a new cybersecurity office to track credit monitoring agencies in legislation introduced Wednesday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Mark Warner, D-Va. It would impose penalties for breaches of consumer data beginning with a base penalty of $100 for each consumer who had one piece of personal identifying information compromised and another $50 for each additional instance. “Under this legislation, Equifax would have had to pay at least a $1.5 billion penalty for their failure to protect Americans’ personal information,” Warren blogged in a Medium post. The Equifax breach “highlighted that credit reporting agencies like Equifax hold vast amounts of data on millions of Americans but lack adequate safeguards against hackers,” Warren said. Consumers Union welcomed the bill.