Security News Fidelity Investments Breach Exposed Customers’ Social Security Numbers

[lokamoka820]

Content source

https://www.howtogeek.com/fidelity-investments-breach-october-2024/

Fidelity Investments has disclosed a data breach that affects 77,099 customers. This breach involves Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, and other personal information that criminals may use to commit fraud or identity theft.

The details here are somewhat murky. An October 9th filing with the Maine attorney general states that a bad actor gained access to "certain information" on August 17th by creating and "using" two customer accounts. Fidelity identified the threat two days later and terminated the bad actor's access.

As for what information was stolen—well, we have to look at a separate filing that TechCrunch found on the Massachusetts state government's website. It says that Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, and financial accounts were compromised in the breach. However, this filing doesn't specify how many people's Social Security and driver's license numbers were stolen. (The reference to financial accounts is a bit confusing, too, as other Fidelity filings claim that user accounts were not compromised.)

"Between August 17 and August 19, a third party accessed and obtained certain information without authorization using two customer accounts that they had recently established. We detected this activity on August 19 and immediately took steps to terminate the access. An investigation was promptly launched with assistance from external security experts. 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)."