Morgan Stanley Banking Hit By Data Breach. Hacks continue to evolve as the hackers themselves get increasingly sophisticated. One of the most recent victims is investment banking giant Morgan Stanley after the attackers stole personal information belonging to their customers by hacking into an Accellion FTA server belonging to a third-party vendor, breaching Morgan Stanley’s network.
The third-party vendor in question, Guidehouse, provides account maintenance service to Morgan Stanley. They notified the banking giant of a breach in May and stealing information belonging to Morgan Stanley customers.
At this time, it is unclear just how the data breach impacts Morgan Stanley’s customers, but the company is in the process of reaching out to all customers to let them know. Although the company has not indicated as much, it’s pretty standard practice for firms to offer 1-2 years of credit protection to customers who have compromised their data. So the odds are excellent that this will be the case here. Although again, there has been no confirmation of the data breach at this point.
In any case, this is a serious data breach for Morgan Stanley Banking, regardless of scope and scale, because the hackers were able to make off with both encrypted files and the decryption key to unlock them.
The stolen data from the Morgan Stanley Banking Hit includes:
- Stock plan participants’ name
- Physical address
- Date of birth
- Social security number
- And company name, where applicable
In other words, more than enough information to steal in a data breach an individual’s identity.
If you bank with Morgan Stanley, be on the lookout for a letter from the company and watch your credit statements like a hawk. If you want to take a more proactive stance, give them a call to verify whether or not you are among the impacted users.
