Laura Pennington  |  February 26, 2019

Category: Data Breach

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A man holds out a mortgage application and a pen.New questions and concerns have been raised in relation to an Ascension customer data breach impacting consumers. Tens of thousands of potential mortgage borrowers may have had their information leaked during a recent mortgage data breach.

Online identity theft and data breaches have become more prominent in recent years, and the Ascension customer data breach is no exception. It is believed that as a part of that data breach, more than 54,000 mortgage borrowers had their financial data compromised.

Borrowers allegedly had no idea that they were potentially vulnerable, and plenty of those affected may still not have realized that a breach occurred. As explained in reports released about that Ascension customer data breach, there was a lack of appropriate security protocols on the online files that contain the private data of these consumers.

According to The Washington Post, this information was not even appropriately protected by a password. At this point, details about the data breach have not revealed how much personal data was accessed, but allegedly the files were opened and exposed for longer than two weeks.

This could become problematic if criminals were to obtain and use this information to purchase merchandise, open new credit card accounts or even apply for new mortgages, creating significant problems for the borrowers after the fact who have to try to clean it up.

Trade publication TechCrunch, which broke the news of the breach, reported that it involved mortgage loans originated by numerous companies, including HSBC Life Insurance, Wells Fargo, one unit of City Group, and Capital One.

According to a story reported by HousingWire, digital files accessed by outside hackers were stored on an unprotected server. That unprotected server had the financial details of more than 24 million banking and mortgage documents.

The data was obtained through a process known as OCR. This is a computer process that enables paper documents to be converted into electronic documents.

Since the original mortgage paper documents were converted into digital files that were not easily read, many people might have assumed that they were out of harm’s reach. However, highly sensitive personal information was stored in those documents, such as dates of birth, Social Security numbers, names, addresses and more.

A separate investigation shared by TechCrunch reports that another exposed and unprotected server had mortgage applications and W9 forms as well. The leaking database source was traced back to an analytics and data company based out of Texas known as Ascension.

The original documents exposed in the second breach could be especially problematic should they fall into the hands of identity thieves. Plenty of consumers are not even aware of the first mortgage data breach, much less the full details of the second one.

Consumers who might have had their personal information accessed are encouraged to monitor their credit reports carefully. Often, the details obtained through a breach are used to open new lines of credit, particularly when a Social Security number is obtained through the hack.

Join a Free Mortgage Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you are a customer of CitiFinancial, HSBC Life Insurance, Wells Fargo, Capital One, or otherwise believe that you were affected by the Ascension breach, you may be eligible to join this mortgage data breach class action lawsuit investigation.

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