CIBC and the Bank of Montreal have admitted that hackers have been able to penetrate their security. Thousands of customers have been compromised.
On the one hand, hackers had to do more than just find the information just randomly lying around. On the other hand, it is the latest in a string of a seemingly never ending list of security incidences. Two Canadian banks have been hit with a data breach. They say hackers have been able to access customer information of thousands of account holders.
CIBC’s Simplii Financial and the Bank of Montreal were the targets. Simplii says as many as 40,000 accounts have been compromised. Meanwhile, the Bank of Montreal says that the incident is limited to less than 50,000 customers. From The Globe and Mail:
BMO, which is Canada’s fourth-largest bank, said the alleged hackers claim to have obtained sensitive information belonging a “limited number” of clients, and threatened to make that data public. The bank believes that fewer than 50,000 customers are affected, and that the attack originated outside Canada. A “thorough investigation” is under way, according to spokesperson Paul Gammal, and BMO has notified “all relevant authorities” as it assess the potential damage.
“We are confident that exposures identified related to customer data have been closed off,” Mr. Gammal said in an e-mail. “We are notifying customers who may have been impacted.”
Simplii also received a claim of an alleged breach involving information for as many as 40,000 customers on Sunday, and “began investigating to understand the claim and verify its accuracy.” The bank plans to reach out to customers who may be affected, and said it has implemented “enhanced online fraud monitoring and online banking security measures.”
“We’re assessing any potential impact,” spokesperson Olga Petrycki said in an e-mail.
This latest incident is just the latest in a very active month for security incidences. The month started off quiet enough, but started with a bang with 34.5 million Aadhaar accounts compromised in a data breach. Shortly after, Chili’s suffered a data breach with an unknown number of credit cards being compromised.
From there, the University of Cambridge suffered a data leak affecting 3 million Facebook accounts. LocationSmart followed this up with their own data leak potentially affecting any American on a major US carrier. The Los Angeles county 211 Crises and Abuse hotline suffered from their own data leak with 3.2 million records being exposed. Controversial app TeenSafe joined in on this party with a data leak of their own affecting thousands of users. Not to be outdone, Comcast suffered their own data leak affecting their Xfinity customers.
This has ultimately become one of the scarier months. We’re used to seeing these incidences happen on average once a week. We are now way beyond that this month. At this point, we’re wondering if security incidences are happening more on a daily basis – at least as far as major ones are concerned. We’re looking back on this month and the incidences just doesn’t seem to end. We’re just waiting and expecting a slowdown to happen at some point and, so far, it hasn’t been forthcoming for the month.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
