Insurance Giant Reveals Most of its American Customers’ Data Was Accessed During Cyberattack

Allianz Life has revealed that a recent cyberattack resulted in the data of the vast majority of its customers in the U.S. being compromised. This revelation was contained in the company’s filing to Maine’s attorney general.

According to the company, the incident occurred on July 16 when malicious actors used social engineering to access a third-party CRM system that Allianz relies on. In the filing, the firm said the data accessed included the personally identifiable information of its customers, company employees and professionals in the financial industry. This particular data breach impacted only the U.S. operations of the company and not its entire global network.

The filing doesn’t provide a specific number of customers that were impacted by this breach.

Allianz says immediate action was taken to contain the breach and that the company alerted the FBI about the incident. The firm says it didn’t find any proof that its global network or policy management system was compromised.

Allianz is one of the largest insurance firms in the world and boasts of having 125 million clients around the world.

Social engineering hacks involve illicit actors tricking or pressurizing individuals to surrender sensitive information. For example, the hackers can impersonate a person that is trusted or impersonate a legitimate company to access the information they need.

Cyberattacks targeting insurance firms and hospital networks have been increasing. This is partly because such entities usually have a trove of sensitive information on prominent people, and large client bases in general. The information obtained on wealthy or prominent people can be used to blackmail those individuals into making payments in order to prevent that information going public.

The data on people who aren’t wealthy or prominent can also be useful to hackers since they can leverage that information for identity theft and then take out loans in the names of the affected individuals or make false insurance claims.

Medical facilities have of late been easy targets for hackers since their cybersecurity systems aren’t so robust due to funding shortages that prevent those entities from accessing the latest protection systems. Healthcare data is also very valuable since it contains private information that can be leveraged by attackers.

For firms like Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK.A) (NYSE: BRK.B) that have considerable investments in the insurance industry, the attack on Allianz may be of great concern since such breaches could jeopardize the stability of the affected business. This is because the industry is sensitive to public sentiment and any adverse event can result in customers abandoning that insurance company that has had its record tainted by the security breach.

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