Customer data of major US asset managers exposed: over 70k investors affected

Fidelity Investments, one of the world’s largest asset managers, has exposed a significant amount of its clients’ data after “access without authorization.”

With $4.9 trillion in assets under management, Fidelity Investments ranks among the top five in the financial services market. However, no one’s immune to the occasional data breach.

Fidelity sent out breach notification letters to thousands of customers informing them that their personal details were obtained without authorization.

“Between August 17th and August 19th, a third party accessed and obtained certain information without authorization using two customer accounts that they had recently established,” the corporation’s breach notification letter said.

The breach notification notes that customer access to Fidelity’s customer accounts was not exposed in the incident.

According to Fidelity, the company terminated the access on August 19th and immediately launched an investigation into the attack. The company said that attackers obtained information related to a “small subset of our customers.”

However, according to the information company submitted to the Maine Attorney General, the total number of exposed individuals slightly surpassed 77,000. The company did not reveal much about what details were exposed, only indicating that name or other personal identifier with other, undisclosed, details were exposed.

However, the sensitivity of exposed details was enough to warrant a safety precaution against identity-impacting attacks as Fidelity said it will provide a free-of-charge option to enroll in a credit monitoring or identity restoration service for 24 months.

We have reached out to the company for clarification and will update the article once we receive a reply.

Earlier this year, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance was exposed in a third-party data breach after attackers obtained the company’s customer data after penetrating Infosys McCamish System (IMS). 28,000 individuals had their names, dates of birth, states of residence, Social Security numbers, bank account and routing numbers, and credit card numbers exposed.

Fidelity Investments is a major asset manager worldwide, controlling nearly as much capital as JPMorgan Case and Morgan Stanley combined. According to its latest annual report, the company managed $4.9 trillion in assets and reported revenue exceeding $28 billion.