Following last Thursday’s announcement from FXCM that the firm had a security breach and was the target of hackers, US equity broker, Scottrade, has also revealed Cybersecurity problems. According to Scottrade, the firm was recently informed by federal law enforcement officials that their network and database of customer information was targeted and breached between late 2013 and early 2014. The breaches were discovered as law officials were investigating a larger cybertheft occurrence affecting financial firms during the above period.
Commenting on the data theft, Scottrade stated that “Social Security numbers, email addresses and other sensitive data were contained in the system accessed”, but, interestingly, they added that “it appears that contact information was the focus of the incident”. The firm also stated that they don’t believe client funds were compromised and that customer passwords were encrypted.
Following up on the revelation of the data theft, Scottrade announce that they have secured the intrusion point and are taking “appropriate steps to further strengthen our network defenses”. The broker is also working with a security firm to conduct an internal forensics investigation.
Although Scottrade doesn’t believe that customer accounts were breached, the data theft has been enough to attract litigation against the firm. Shortly after Scottrade revealed the federal law enforcement finding, Keller Rohrback L.L.P. announced that they were investigating the data breach. Keller Rohrback is a litigation group that has been involved with the representation of customers of firms that have suffered data breaches that allowed private client information to be stolen.
