Fidelity Investments says hackers stole the data of 77,000 customers from its systems

Boston, Massachusetts-based Fidelity Investments Life Insurance Company said it experienced a data security incident that compromised the sensitive personal information of close to 80,000 individuals.

 

In a notice of data breach filed with the Office of Maine Attorney General, Fidelity Investments said that on August 19, it detected unauthorised access to its internal network and quickly launched an investigation, with assistance from external cyber security experts, to determine the nature and scope of the incident.

 

The investigation revealed that “between August 17 and August 19, a third party accessed and obtained certain information without authorisation using two customer accounts that they had recently established,” Fidelity said.

 

“The information obtained by the third party related to a small subset of our customers. Please note that this incident did not involve any access to your Fidelity account(s),” it added.

 

The insurance company said the compromised data included names and other personal identifiers of its customers. It also revealed in its filing with the Maine state regulator that at least 77,099 individuals were impacted by the incident.

 

“We take this incident and the security of your information very seriously. Upon detecting this activity, we promptly took steps to terminate the activity and address this incident,” the company said.

 

Fidelity Investments added that it found no evidence of the compromised information being misused, however, it has advised all affected individuals to regularly monitor their credit reports, account and benefit statements and report any suspicious activity to law enforcement authorities, including the police and state attorney general.

 

It has also offered two years of complimentary identity protection and credit monitoring services through Transunion to all affected individuals.

 

Earlier this year, the company reported another data breach after one of its service providers, Infosys McCamish System, suffered a data security incident. Fidelity reported that it had identified just over 28,000 individuals who were affected by the incident.