Scottrade, a prominent company in the world of investments and brokerage services, announced a massive data breach on Friday, which could possibly affect about 4.6 million customers of the company. The only problem? The announcement came years later, with Scottrade only learning about the massive data breach after federal law enforcement officials alerted the company about the incident, reports PC World.
According to Scottrade, the breach happened sometime during the late 2013 to early 2014 period, with attackers possibly gaining access to the company's clients' names and street addresses. Scottrade maintains that the hackers were not able to access any of its clients' sensitive data, such as social security numbers, email addresses and similar data.
"We have no reason to believe that Scottrade's trading platforms or any client funds were compromised. Client passwords remained fully encrypted at all times and we have not seen any indication of fraudulent activity as a result of this incident," the company said in a statement, according to CIO Today.
The investment company was informed of the massive data breach in August, though the FBI requested that the data breach not be announced due to an ongoing investigation. Scottrade was eventually given the go-signal at the end of last week.
October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month in the U.S., and with this latest incident, it seems like the millions of Scottrade's clients just had their awareness fully raised.
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