Recent Data Breach at Ascension Is Worse than Originally Estimated

Last month, the large financial data company Ascension Data & Analytics suffered a major data breach, putting over 24 million sensitive documents exposed to identify theft.

Allegedly, the recent data breach occurred because one of the company’s servers were misconfigured and left vulnerable. Unfortunately, experts now say that the recent data breach at Ascension Data & Analytics was more severe than initially thought.

In the recent data breach at Ascension, financial and banking documents were exposed. This also meant that personal information from the people involved with those documents were exposed, including names, addresses, birth dates, and social security numbers.

If you bank with, or have a mortgage loan with CitiFinancial, HSBS Life Insurance, Wells Fargo, and Capital One, your information may have been exposed in the Ascension data breach. Federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Developments were also affected, as they had documents with Ascension that may have been compromised in the data breach.

TechCrunch reported that according to initial investigations, the Ascension server was left vulnerable because it was not protected by a password. Experts are now wondering how such a simple problem could have gone unnoticed. This one problem let decades of important information vulnerable to theft by hackers.

Then, HousingWire reported that it wasn’t just one server left vulnerable — reportedly, a separate unprotected server also left documents available, making the recent data breach more severe and harder to recover from. Reportedly, information from the first server had been converted to a less readable format, but on the second server, original documents were exposed and were more easily readable. This means that the information is more vulnerable than originally thought. 

According to TechCruch, 54,000 mortgage borrowers may have had their information left vulnerable to identity theft in Ascension’s recent data breach.

In recent years, companies have made news headlines for massive data breaches that compromise the information security of customers, employees, and more. Many people who have had their information compromised in such data breaches wonder why companies don’t do more to protect data from breaches before they happen.

Some customers wonder why companies don’t learn from one another’s mistakes, and why information security continues to be under attack by hackers.

Identity theft can take a toll, because it can be very time consuming for someone to recover from theft. Beyond any funds lost from an exposed bank account number, for example, damage comes in the form of a lowered credit score from fraudulent purchases and many hours spent attempting to change passwords and recover information security.

IBM sponsored a study that examined the cost of data breaches. The study was conducted by the Ponemon Institute, and discovered that the cost of data breaches has risen 6.4 percent from the previous year.

Now, the average cost of a data breach like the one that occurred at Ascension is $3.86 million. The Ponemon study also revealed that the average cost for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive information is $148 — a 4.8 percent increase year over year. 

So the number of data breaches isn’t slowing down, and the toll they take on companies and individuals can be large. Unfortunately, the January 2019 Ascension data breach is just one example of an enormous problem.

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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