Morgan Stanley, a leading company offering Financial Services in America, had made it official that some hackers infiltration into its database and accessed sensitive information related to its customers.
However, the Banking firm said that the data access took place at a 3rd party server farm and was committed by exploiting a vulnerability in Accellion accounting software.
The third party company in discussion is Guidehouse that offers accounting services to nearly 70% of customer base of Morgan Stanley.
According to a source from Guidehouse, the data leak took place when the hackers entered the database and decrypted all stored information from the database and then locked up the file access by inducing new encryption algorithms into the database.
Cybersecurity Insiders have learnt that the hackers couldn’t break into the database that hosted password credentials and so all customer financial transactions were still safe.
However, the information that was accessed by the hackers includes social security numbers, date of births, addresses, customer names and company names.
Note 1- Guidehouse says that it patched all its servers hosting Accellion software within 5 days of the patch release in January 2021. But somehow the threat actors infiltrated the database by re-exploiting the FTA vulnerability.
Note 2– CLOP Ransomware gang is suspected to be responsible for the hack on Morgan Stanley and said to have exploited a SQL injection vulnerability found on legacy systems.
Note 3- The matter was disclosed to the media after the money dealing firm wrote a letter to New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office on July 2nd,2021.
