Scottrade Hacked, Personal Information for 4.6 Million Customers Stolen

They believe the data that was accessed includes client names, street addresses, and other personal information.

“It appears that contact information was the focus of the incident”, Scottrade said.

Just this week, Experian Plc revealed that sensitive data of a few 15 million people seeking to open an account with T-Mobile US Inc may have been compromised. A few 4.6 million customers might have been affected due to the hack.

In a statement published on the company website, Scottrade acknowledged that, based on information from a combination of Federal law enforcement sources and internal investigations, a breach in Scottrade’s network occurred “between late 2013 and early 2014”.

Scottrade believes client names and addresses were the target of the hack. Any customer with an existing Scottrade account before February of 2014 may have had their contact information and Social Security numbers taken.

Global security strategist Trey Ford of security firm Rapid7 noted encryption doesn’t make it impossible to recover passwords, only expensive and time consuming. The company said it had strengthened its network to prevent other hacks.

“We have not seen any indication of fraudulent activity as a result of this incident”.

As is expected in these sorts of cases, Scottrade is offering affected customers a free year of identity theft protection. We’ll update this post if and when we get more information.

News of the two cyber attacks heralded the first two days of Cybersecurity Awareness Month.