JPMorgan Chase & Co is warning about 465,000 holders of prepaid cash cards issued by the bank that their personal information may have been accessed by hackers who attacked its network in July.
The cards were issued for corporations to pay employees and for government agencies to issue tax refunds, unemployment compensation and other benefits.
JPMorgan said on Wednesday it detected that its Web servers used by its site www.ucard.chase.com had been breached in the middle of September. It then fixed the issue and reported the breach to law enforcement.
Bank spokesman Michael Fusco said that in the months since the breach was discovered the bank has been investigating to find out exactly which accounts were involved and what pieces of information could have been taken. He declined to discuss how the attackers breached the bank’s network.
Fusco said the bank is notifying the cardholders, who account for about 2 percent of its roughly 25 million UCard users, about the breach because it cannot rule out the possibility that their personal information was among the data removed from its servers.
The bank typically keeps the personal information of its customers encrypted as a security precaution. However, during the course of the breach, personal data belonging to those customers had temporarily appeared in plain text in files the computers use to log activity.
The bank believes “a small amount” of data was taken, but not critical personal information such as social security numbers, birth dates and e-mail addresses.
Cybercriminals covet such data because it can be used to open bank accounts, obtain credit cards and engage in identity theft. Many states require banks to notify customers if they believe there is any chance that such information may have been taken in a breach.
The bank is also offering the cardholders a year of free credit-monitoring services.
The warning only affects the bank’s UCard users, not holders of debit cards, credit cards or prepaid Liquid cards.
Fusco said the bank has not found that any funds were stolen as a result of the breach and that it has no evidence that other crimes have been committed. As a result, it is not issuing replacement cards.
The spokesman declined to identify the government agencies and businesses whose customers it had warned about the breach. Fox 8 News in New Orleans reported on its Web site that three Louisiana agencies were notified by the bank on Wednesday that the personally identifiable information of some state citizens may have been exposed.
The bank said it does not know who was behind the attack, though the US Secret Service and FBI are investigating the matter.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS