The financial technology behemoth Finastra is alerting victims of a data breach after unidentified hackers initially gained access to its networks in October 2024 and took their personal data. More than 8,100 financial institutions in 130 countries, including 45 of the top 50 banks in the world, rely on London-based Finastra to supply financial services software applications.
The security incident was discovered on November 7 after Finastra detected malicious activity on some of its systems, as the business warned in breach notification letters given to those impacted by the breach.
"Our investigation revealed that an unauthorized third party accessed a Secure File Transfer Platform (SFTP) at various times between October 31, 2024 and November 8, 2024. Findings from the investigation indicate that on October 31, 2024, the unauthorized third party obtained certain files from the SFTP," the fintech giant noted.
"Finastra has no indication the unauthorized third party further copied, retained, or shared any of the data. We have no reason to suspect your information has or will be misused. As a result, we believe the risk to individuals whose personal data was involved is low.”
At least 65 people in the state whose financial account information was stolen received breach notification letters from Finastra last week, although the company has not yet disclosed the number of victims or the type of data that was compromised (apart from the names of the victims), according to filings with the Massachusetts Attorney General's office.
Additionally, the financial services organisation offers those whose information was compromised or stolen in the incident two years of free credit monitoring and identity restoration services through Experian.
The hack is believed to be connected to a (now-deleted) post on the BreachForums online cybercrime community by a threat actor called "abyss0" who claimed to sell 400GB of data allegedly stolen from Finastra's network, despite the fact that Finastra only revealed a very small amount of information in filings with Attorney General offices.
Last year in November, when a local media outlet enquired about the forum post, a Finastra spokesperson declined to confirm or deny ownership of the data, stating that the company experienced a limited-scope security incident and is assessing its impact.
"On November 7, 2024 Finastra's Security Operations Center (SOC) detected suspicious activity related to an internally hosted Secure File Transfer Platform (SFTP) we use to send files to certain customers," Finastra added.
Finastra was also forced to shut down parts of its systems in March 2020 to combat what Tom Kilroy, the company's Chief Operating Officer at the time, described as a ransomware attack. While the company did not disclose how the attackers got access to its systems, cyber threat intelligence firm Bad Packets discovered that Finastra had many unpatched Pulse Secure VPN and Citrix ADC (NetScaler) servers prior to the attack.
