Till date, we have heard companies losing ground in a business arena due to a cyber attack. But today a new development has been witnessed in the tech world all due to a data breach.
Equifax CEO Richard Smith has decided to retire and forgo his annual bonus following a massive Cyber attack which leaked critical info of more than 148 million customers early this month.
According to the details available to Cybersecurity Insiders, in mid-May and July this year, hackers gained access to the systems of the credit monitoring firm and accessed critical info. The leak which was caused by an exploit of a software glitch was reported to the media on September 7th this year which resulted in the slide down of company’s shares in the bullion market by 30 percent meeting a mark of $103.35/share.
Richard Smith might have thought that it is the best time to hand over the business to a new leadership and announced his sudden retirement today.
Paulino Do Rego Barros, 1, who was a President of Equifax Asia Pacific, has been declared as the interim CEO.
Note- The announcement comes just a week before Smith was to testify before multiple congressional committee members about the cyber attack.
As per the saying of Equifax Board members, Smith will still be eligible to testify before the panel on October 3rd this year and will attend the financial panel’s hearing on October 4th, 2017.
Smith was not available to comment on this issue. But Mark Feidler, the Non-executive Chairman of Equifax said that his company will work normally despite the change in the leadership. He hopes that Barros leadership will breathe a new life into the company which has more than 10K employees.
