US Senator Elizabeth Warren [official website] on Friday introduced a bill [text, PDF] and announced an investigation [press release] into the recent Equifax breach.

The proposed legislation is said to give consumers the ability to freeze their credit [The Street report] for free when such attacks take place. This is a response to the massive breach of Equifax, which left the data of 143 million people unprotected.

Warren also wrote letters Equifax and other credit monitoring agencies to gain information in attempt to see if the consumers need new layers of protection. In a letter [text, PDF] to Equifax chairman Richard Smith, Warren expressed concern [Reuters report], “I am troubled by this attack – described as ‘one of the largest risks to personally sensitive information in recent years’ and by the fact that it represents the third recent instance of a data breach of Equifax or its subsidiaries that has endangered American’s personal information”.

The introduction of this legislation comes at a time where the American consumer is at constant risk to cyber attacks. A report in January indicated that in 2016 the number of data breaches reached a record [JURIST report] high throughout the course of the year.