In one of the largest data breaches yet, JP Morgan Chase has found itself at the end of a leak of 76m customer and business owners’ data to unknown hackers.
The discovery of this enormous breach came after a security filing posted online yesterday found that JP Morgan Chase, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, underestimated the number of customers affected by the online intrusion by 75m account holders, according to The New York Times.
The intrusion was first found to have happened last June but only discovered the following month, according to the report, and now its customers’ personal information including names, addresses, telephone numbers and emails are available to the highest bidder online.
However, JP Morgan Chase have emphasises that the arguably more important information of bank details, social security numbers and passwords, have been unaffected by this breach.
No money taken
It is understood that the hackers involved in this case were able to exploit their systems’ vulnerabilities by obtaining a checklist of all the systems the company ran and finding what their weak points were.
The motives of whoever the hackers may be remains unclear as they infiltrated deep into the bank’s 90 internal servers but seemingly were not performing a digital bank raid.
The New York Times report that security experts and government officials believing they may have originated from southern Europe and could even have been under the influence of the Russian government, but this is still very much speculation.
The bank will now begin the re-building process of its digital security systems and has promised to spend almost US$250m on its security from online threats.
JP Morgan Chase building image via Shutterstock
