Thank you very much for those two questions.
In regard to what we're doing here in Canada, as I mentioned, we've retained globally PwC and Mandiant to work with all the Equifax entities. We have 24 companies across the world, and we're working with them.
In terms of the closed-loop confirmation that I mentioned earlier, where we not only issue the order to patch, but we also receive confirmation that it was patched, that's in place. I mentioned in my opening statement that it used to take 48 hours to put such patches in place. That has been decreased to 24 hours or less, in terms of what we're doing globally.
We're also refining any existing industry best practices, procedures, and standards. We want to be above industry best practices. I didn't mention that the chief security officer now reports to our interim CEO, so the corporate governance structure has changed at Equifax in terms of accountability. We're centralizing that security rather than having a decentralized system country by country. We're working with all those individuals. We've appointed a chief transformation officer as well to get some better transparency from a security and IT perspective not only in Canada but also globally, so that this incident won't occur in the U.S., in Canada, in Argentina, or anywhere else we operate.
In regard to your second question, on the reputations of affected consumers, Toni's team works individually case by case with each individual consumer. We have call centre representatives who are able to alleviate any consumer concerns or frustrations in terms of walking them through what has transpired, if anything, with their information. We have protections in place that have been used in incidents a lot larger than ours to afford Canadians protection. Again, our number one priority is the Canadian consumer. I've heard from neighbours, friends, family. This affects everybody's reputation. We have 10,000 employees globally. It affects them as dearly as it does the Canadians who were impacted.
At the same time, we want to ensure that Canadians are afforded the best protections there are in the market, based on the regulatory situations in each country. There's a different regulatory situation in the U.S. from that in Canada. We want to make sure we apply those to each country individually to best represent those individuals.