Equifax Inc. Chief Executive Officer Richard Smith resigned, joining other senior managers who left the credit reporting company amid an uproar over the theft of private data on 143 million Americans.
Smith will be replaced by Paulino do Rego Barros Jr., a seven-year company veteran who was most recently president of Asia Pacific, the Atlanta-based firm said Tuesday in a statement. Board member Mark Feidler, a former BellSouth Corp. president, was named non-executive chairman.
"The board remains deeply concerned about and totally focused on the cybersecurity incident," Feidler said in the statement. "We are working intensely to support consumers and make the necessary changes to minimize the risk that something like this happens again."
Equifax has drawn outrage from lawmakers and scrutiny from regulators since Sept. 7. when it disclosed one of the biggest cyberattacks. Hackers stole sensitive data — including Social Security numbers, birth dates and other identifying information — for much of the adult U.S. population.
Smith, who will remain as an unpaid adviser to the company, isn't the first executive to go down in the wake of the disclosure. The firm's chief information and chief security officers retired as of Sept. 15, the company said in a statement that didn't identify the executives. David C. Webb, who joined the firm in January 2010, was previously chief information officer, according to an annual regulatory filing in February. Susan Mauldin had been chief security officer, according to her professional profile on LinkedIn and an Equifax press release from 2015.
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