The top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wants his panel to hold a hearing on the recent hack at Home Depot, which may have jeopardized financial information for tens of millions of shoppers.
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) told Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) on Thursday that investigating the company’s data security would be a fair move, after the multiple sessions the committee has held on HealthCare.gov.
{mosads}“Over the past year, the committee has been investigating the security of the HealthCare.gov website,” he wrote, noting the “numerous public hearings” and lengthy documents it has reviewed. “To date, however, no personally identifiable information has been compromised as a result of malicious cyber-attacks, although outside actors have repeatedly tried.”
“Cybersecurity threats are ongoing challenges for both the federal government and the private sector,” Cummings wrote. “For these reasons, I believe an investigation of the data security breach at Home Depot will help the committee learn from these witnesses about security vulnerabilities they have experienced in order to better protect our federal information technology assets.”
The hack, which the company acknowledged earlier this week, affected an estimated 60 million shoppers’ credit and debit cards in the U.S. and Canada.
Coming on the heels of the headline-grabbing theft of celebrities’ nude photos from Apple’s cloud storage service, the incident has put data security back in the spotlight.
A pair of Democratic senators told the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company’s cyber defenses were strong enough, and other senators have said the incident underscores the need for new laws.