70,000 bank customers exposed through vendor attack

Two more banks have come forward about a data breach that exposed customer information after their third-party vendor, Marquis Software Solutions, was hacked.

Texas-based VeraBank has notified the authorities that 37,318 clients were affected by the breach, informing its customers that their names and some other personal information was exposed as part of the incident.

The bank didn’t specify what other personal information was potentially retrieved by bad actors, but its data breach notification letter suggests that it varied from client to client.

The Marquis hack also affected 32,344 customers of the Delaware-based Artisans’ Bank, which said that the personal information potentially subject to unauthorized access included client names and Social Security numbers.

Both banks said Marquis informed them that it conducted its own investigation and informed law enforcement of the breach that it said happened on August 14th.

The Artisans’ Bank said it only learned of the breach in late October and “only recently” that its own customer information may have been compromised. VeraBank said that its own systems were not affected and the attack was limited to Marquis’s environment.

In November, Maine’s Norway Savings Bank (NSB) informed clients that their personal details were exposed following a ransomware attack on Marquis, its software provider. The breach affected 51,000 NSB clients.

NSB said the breach exposed its clients’ names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, Tax ID numbers, and financial account information.

Cybernews reported at the time that it appeared Marquis paid the attackers a ransom. While not illegal, it carries a number of risks: there is no guarantee that the attackers wouldn’t share the stolen data on the dark web anyway and it also puts the victim in danger of follow-up attacks.

Texas-based Marquis is a digital marketing, compliance solution, and customer relationship manager (CRM) software provider counting over 700 banks in the US as its clients.

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