Iowa’s Attorney General will be asking state legislators to enact a law that would force a company to tell consumers if their credit card or financial information is somehow compromised. California has a such a law, and Bob Brammer, a spokesman for Iowa’s Attorney General, says that law may be bringing cases to light when hackers breach computer systems and steal financial data. An Atlanta company recently announced hackers may have had access to up to 22 million Visa accounts and 14 million Master Card accounts that were handled by the company. Attorneys General from 48 states, including Iowa, are pressuring the company to notify affected consumers, as required by that California law. Brammer says officials want to know how it happened, and what the company — known as CardSystems — is doing to prevent something like this happening in the future. “It’s not very clear yet what they’re going to do and, for sure, what the federal government might require them to do, so the states are banding together just to get a little extra clout,” Brammer says. He says experts in the Iowa Attorney General’s office are reviewing California’s disclosure law on security breaches involving financial data and will draft a proposal for Iowa lawmakers to consider when the Legislature reconvenes in January.
