Fidelity Investments, one of the world's largest asset managers, confirmed that the personal information of 77,000 customers was compromised in an August data breach.
The Boston, Massachusetts-based investment firm said in a filing Wednesday with the Maine Attorney General's Office that an anonymous third party “used two recently established customer accounts” between Aug. 17 and Aug. 19. ” and accessed information on the company's systems.
“We detected this behavior on August 19th and immediately took steps to terminate access,” Fidelity said in a letter to those affected. It added that access was not included.
Fidelity confirmed that a total of 77,099 customers were affected by this breach, and a full investigation of the compromised data determined that customers' personal information was affected. It was not immediately clear how the breach of two Fidelity customer accounts allowed access to the data of thousands of other customers.
The financial giant has not yet disclosed what kind of personal data was compromised, and no information about the breach could be found on its website at the time of writing.
Fidelity spokesperson Michael Aalto told TechCrunch that the incident did not involve access to Fidelity customer accounts or funds. Fidelity declined to answer specific questions about the incident.
According to Fidelity, the company has more than 51 million individual investors as clients, with total client assets of approximately $14.1 trillion as of June 2024.
Updated with response from Fidelity.