According to the preliminary findings of InfoWatch Analytical Center, in 2018, banks, finance and insurance companies managed to stop the general growth of personal, payment, and other confidential data breaches, but at the same time suffered more leaks caused by hackers.
This is a digest of the top data leaks from banks, finance and insurance companies in 2018, prepared by InfoWatch Analytical Center.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia admitted that it had lost backup data affecting 19.8 million accounts opened by 12 million people, or half the population of Australia. It turns out that, during the decommissioning of an outdated data center in 2016, the bank’s contractor Fuji Xerox lost two unencrypted magnetic tape drives that contained customer names, addresses, account numbers and transaction details covering a 16-year period between 2000 and 2016. The tapes seem to have fallen out of the car on the way to a disposal site.
Government Payment Service, the company that enables online payments for 2,300 U.S. state and local governments across 35 states, inadvertently made available information on more than 14 million customers from as long as six years ago, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and the last four digits of credit card numbers. According to cyber experts, people were able to view millions of customer records just by altering digits in the Web address that displayed receipts.
SunTrust Bank (U.S.) reported the potential data breach caused by its former employee who accessed its contact lists containing information like names, addresses, and account balances of approximately 1.5 million customers and then attempted to print the information and give it to a “criminal third party.”
Liberty, one of the largest financial services providers in the Republic of South Africa, said that it had been hit by an IT systems breach that compromised personal data of almost a million of its customers, including names, ID numbers, mobile numbers, e-mail addresses, and unencrypted passwords.
In 2018, cryptocurrency exchanges most suffered from serious financial losses. Many such start-ups seem to be far behind traditional financial service providers when it comes to security. Thus, Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck, one of the largest in the country, became the victim of a massive hack resulting in a loss of $534 million. The hackers managed to steal the private key for the hot wallet where NEM coins were stored, enabling them to drain the funds. Italy-based cryptocurrency exchange desk BitGrail reported that hackers had made off with $195 million worth of Nano (XRB) coins.
