Newsroom

NAFCU's Carrie Hunt on Friday sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission, CFPB and NCUA requesting that they all work together to get to the bottom of the Equifax data breach and share their findings so credit unions can best help their members deal with this breach's impact.

Hunt, NAFCU's executive vice president of government affairs and general counsel, told the regulators that many credit union members are "distressed and turning to their credit unions to learn whether Equifax's breach has exposed their data, what ramifications this poses, and what they can do to mitigate any further loss."

NAFCU has set up a webpage dedicated to providing credit unions and their members with informational resources and on-going developments regarding this breach. The association hopes to use this page as a way to offer further assistance in sharing any information and guidance that the regulators have found.

"Credit unions want to know which accounts have been compromised so that they can help their members," she wrote to the regulators. "While NAFCU has already reached out to Equifax to learn more about the expanse of the breach, we have also become aware that several state regulators, such as the New York Department of Financial Services, have already started communicating and sharing information with banks under their supervision."

In her letter to the NCUA, Hunt shared credit unions' most common concerns and questions regarding this breach, including how the industry can protect their members' data from being used illicitly and the steps credit unions should take following the breach.

The Equifax breach, reportedly discovered July 29, made vulnerable up to 143 million consumers' Social Security numbers, birth dates and home addresses, plus some driver's license numbers. Hackers are said to have obtained 209,000 consumers' credit card numbers and credit dispute documents for as many as 182,000 others. NAFCU President and CEO Dan Berger reiterated a call to House and Senate leaders for a national data security standard following the breach.