MutualFundWire.com: Were Funds Affected By the Boston Behemoth's August Data Breach?

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Friday, October 11, 2024

Were Funds Affected By the Boston Behemoth's August Data Breach?

Less than two months ago, the Boston Behemoth suffered a data breach affecting tens of thousands of individuals. Yet the asset manager's team has not revealed what impact (if any) the cybersecurity incident has had on their giant mutual fund and ETF business.

Abigail Pierrepont "Abby" Johnson
FMR (dba Fidelity Investments)
Chair, President, CEO

Fidelity Investments [profile] experienced a data breach from August 17 to August 19, according to a data breach disclosure filed yesterday with the office of the Maine Attorney General. An unauthorized third party, "using two customer accounts that they had recently established," accessed "personal information" (Fidelity didn't specify beyond that) about 77,099 individuals, according to the Fidelity filing and the letters they sent to those affected.

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP partner Heather Egan, who submitted the data breach notification on Fidelity's behalf, declined to comment.

A Fidelity spokesperson declined to comment on whether or not any of the provider's mutual funds, or those funds' shareholders, were affected by the August breach. (The spokesperson also declined to comment on the affect, if any, on Fidelity's retirement plan recordkeeping business, as noted by our sister publication 401kWire

"We are not providing that detail related to customers," the Fidelty spokesperson writes to MFWire via email.

The Fidelity spokesperson explained how the team responded to the breach:

We detected this activity on August 19 and immediately took steps to terminate the access. An investigation was promptly launched with assistance from external security experts. The information obtained by the third party related to a small subset of our customers and the incident did not involve any access to Fidelity customers' accounts or funds. We are notifying individuals as appropriate and providing them credit monitoring resources. We recognize our customers may have questions about this event and we have resources in place to assist them. Fidelity takes its responsibility to serve customers and safeguard information seriously.

The spokesperson adds, "We are not providing further details on the information, but to reinforce, accounts were not accessed."

For those individuals who have been affected by the breach, the Fidelity team is offering 24 months of credit monitoring and identity theft restoration services through Transunion LLC, according to the notification filed with the Maine AG.

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