Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday demanded Capital One and Amazon explain how a hacker was able to steal personal information from than a 100 million Capital One credit applications.
In a pair of letters to Capital One CEO Richard Fairbanks and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Republicans requested a staff-level briefing on the incident by August 15.
The committee’s ranking Republican, Jim Jordan of Ohio authored the letter and was joined by Reps. Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Michael Cloud of Texas.
In the letter to Mr. Bezos, the lawmakers said the committee wants to review the breach in relation to the federal contracts Amazon hopes to secure. The Capital One data was stored on a cloud service provided by Amazon Web Services. The accused hacker, Paige Thompson, is a former Amazon engineer.
“Because AWS will provide the trusted Internet connection and cloud support for the 2020 census and could potentially run the Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure could computing system, the committee may carefully examine the consequences of this breach,” the lawmakers wrote.
In a separate letter, the lawmakers asked Mr. Fairbanks to describe Capital One’s response to the attack.
The letters mark the first effort by Congress to learn more about the hack.
FBI agents on Monday arrested Ms. Thompson. She is accused of obtaining personal information from more than 100 million Capital One credit applications, including 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers.
There is no evidence the data was sold or distributed to others.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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