But Equifax has stumbled in the recent past in its efforts to protect data. The company has only recently recovered from a scandal related to a 2017 data breach that exposed sensitive data on 148 million files. The company ended up paying penalties totaling $671 million as part of an agreement to settle multidistrict class-action litigation and probes by the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the New York Department of Financial Services, and attorneys general for 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. In June 2018, Equifax entered into a consent order with eight states that mandated it improve its data-protection methods.