JP Morgan is the US's biggest bank and it got a massive cyber attack on 76 million private and seven million business customers in the US. An employee password was used to crack a JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) server and ultimately pull off one of the largest cyber-attacks ever, accessing data on 76 million households and 7 million small businesses. Even though the hacker collected information and addresses of the account holders, the collected information were not critical.
For Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it had not seen any "unusual customer fraud related to this incident". Home Depot and Target have been the subject of similar wide scale attacks. JP Morgan says customers are not required to take any action, such as changing their passwords or account information.
Its company spokeswoman, Patricia Wexler, said that the bank is not offering credit monitoring to customers either because it does not believe any financial information, account data or personally identifiable information was taken. He added, some of those affected by the incursion were outside the U.S., In addition to contact information, hackers tapped into internal data identifying customers by category, such as whether they are clients of the private-bank, mortgage, auto or credit-card divisions.
She further added that all details has not been exposed, so there's no need to take actions by customers.Information on both current and former customers was exposed, as well as on some non-customers, including people who may have logged on to JPMorgan websites to conduct transactions with bank clients. Data were compromised through Chase.com and JPMorganOnline.com, and the mobile apps that support those websites.
JPMorgan shares rose 1.5 percent to $59.72 at 9:56 a.m.(October 3,2014) in New York and have gained about 2.2 percent this year, trailing the 6.1 percent advance for the 85-company Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index.
The U.S. total household is 115 million and 76 million households were affected. Earlier this year, 145 million personal records were taken in a breach of EBay Inc. An attack on retailer Target Corp. during last year’s holiday season affected as many as 110 million shoppers. An attack at Home Depot Inc. disclosed last month compromised 56 million payment cards.
According to the people familiar with the bank’s review the attack at JPMorgan started in June. The hackers entered a web-development server with an employee’s user name and password, then got their access into lender’s network, the people said.
Government officials and security specialists have long warned of the possibility of cyber disruptions in the financial system and other services and utilities. Those concerns are heightened in times of conflict.
Having said that people should themselves be aware about the possible threat and must take actions to stay away from trouble. Changing password often and signing off from devices when you leave the desk will help to increase security.
