FX168 Financial News (Asia Pacific) News Wall Street giant Fidelity (Fidelity), which manages $5.5 trillion in customer assets, confirmed that in an August data breach, more than 77,000 customer records were hacked, including licenses, social security numbers, and personal privacy information.

The investment company, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, said in documents submitted to the Maine Attorney General on Wednesday (10/9) that an unnamed third party “used two of their recently established customer accounts” to access information in its systems between August 17 and August 19.

In a letter to affected users, Fidelity said: “We detected this activity on August 19 and immediately took steps to terminate access,” adding that the incident did not involve any access to the customer's Fidelity account.

(Source: Yahoo Finance)

Tech Crunch reports that Fidelity confirmed that a total of 7,7099 customers were affected by this leak, and its comprehensive review of the damaged data determined that the customer's personal information was affected.

In another data breach notice filed with the New Hampshire Attorney General, Fidelity revealed that a third party “accessed and retrieved certain documents relating to Fidelity customers and other individuals by submitting fraudulent requests to an internal database that holds images of Fidelity customer files.”

According to another data breach notice submitted by Fidelity to the Massachusetts Attorney General, Fidelity said the data breach included the customer's Social Security number and driver's license.

Currently, no information about this leak has been found on the Fidelity website.

Fidelity spokesman Michael Aalto said in an interview that the incident did not involve access to Fidelity customer accounts or funds.

According to Fidelity, the company has more than 51 million individual investor clients and manages employee benefit plans for around 28,000 businesses in 11 countries.

As of June, Fidelity managed approximately $5.5 trillion in client assets and approximately $14.1 trillion in assets under management.

In an email statement sent to The Register, a Fidelity spokesperson reiterated the breach disclosure statement and emphasized: “We are informing individuals as appropriate and providing them with credit monitoring resources. We recognize that our customers may have questions about this incident, and we have prepared resources to help them. Fidelity takes its responsibility to serve customers and protect information seriously.”

Fidelity said it “did not find any misuse of customer personal information” due to security breaches. However, the company provided affected customers with two years of free credit monitoring services.

In March of this year, Fidelity Investments Life Insurance (Fidelity Investments Life Insurance) notified nearly 30,000 customers that criminals had stolen their personal and financial information after breaking into Infosys' IT systems in the fall. In this third-party intrusion, the crooks stole Fidelity customers' bank accounts and routing numbers, credit card numbers, and security or access codes.