Some M&T Bank customer information hacked in massive data breach

NBC Connecticut

Some M&T Bank customers' information may have been stolen in what was a massive cyber-attack, impacting many other companies too.

In a statement, the bank says it wasn’t their internal system that was involved, but rather a third-party company that it uses for file transfer software.

“M&T was informed about a recent global cybersecurity incident involving MOVEit, a file transfer software owned by Progress Software and used by government agencies, major financial firms, and thousands of other organizations, which resulted in the potential exposure of customer information for any organizations using the software,” an M&T spokesperson said in a statement.

NBC News reports that a Russian-speaking cybercrime group, CL0P, appears to have identified a flaw in MOVEit, impacting many big companies or entities that use their software like the BBC, Shell, Johns Hopkins Health Systems, British Airways, the State of Illinois, and the departments of motor vehicles of Oregon and Louisiana, too.

M&T Bank says an investigation determined “that limited customer information held by certain third-party service providers was compromised,” including names, addresses, and M&T account numbers. “No PINs or passwords were exposed. This information did not include sensitive data such as social security numbers, date of birth, or debit/credit card numbers."

Once it learned of the cybersecurity breach, M&T immediately installed security patches. A spokesperson said as soon as their investigation was complete, they started communicating with impacted customers and providing free credit monitoring.

MOVEit released a statement about the breach Wednesday afternoon:

“When we discovered the vulnerabilities in MOVEit Transfer and MOVEit Cloud, we worked quickly to provide initial mitigation strategies, deployed a patch on May 31 that fixed the issue and communicated directly with our customers so they could take action to harden their environments. An advanced and persistent threat actor used a sophisticated, multi-stage attack to exploit this zero day vulnerability and we are committed to playing a collaborative role in the industry-wide effort to combat cybercriminals intent on maliciously exploiting vulnerabilities in widely used software products.”

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