Data and analytics company Ascension has suffered a data leak that exposed online over 24 million documents relating to loan and mortgage agreements with major U.S. financial institutions, including CitiFinancial, HSBC Life Insurance, Wells Fargo, CapitalOne, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The documents, stored in a server running an Elasticsearch database, revealed personally identifiable and highly sensitive information, including names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, bank and checking account numbers, credit history, and details of loan and mortgage agreements dating as far back as 2008. The server was not password protected, allowing anyone complete access. Ascension’s vendor, OpticsML, learned of the server security lapse on January 15, 2019, and immediately shut down the server, but the information may have been exposed long enough for anyone to find. If you entered into a loan or mortgage agreement with any of the above listed financial institutions at any time since 2008, your personally identifiable and highly sensitive information may have been compromised. Please contact FBFG to discuss your legal options.
