Robinhood Markets, a stock brokering app, has revealed that it has become a victim of a sophisticated cyber attack where personal information of millions of its customers could have leaked and accessed by hackers.
A preliminary estimate made by the company says that over 7 million customers could have found their data exposed during the attack that took place on November 3rd of this year.
Inquires made by our Cybersecurity Insiders have revealed that the digital incident could have been of a ransomware variant where the hackers launched a social engineering attack on a team member related to customer support thereafter taking down full control of the servers and demanding a ransom from the company.
Robinhood Exchange cleared the air that no details related to social security numbers, bank account details or debit card details of its customers were compromised in the attack.
In an official statement released by Robinhood Markets Stock over 5 million of customers were affected by the attack as their email addresses were accessed by hackers, over 2 million names were accessed to the threat actors and most sensitive info such as names, zip codes and date of births related to over 310 customers were leaked to hackers.
Virginia based security firm Mandiant was pressed into service to investigate the incident and to estimate the impact on Robinhood IPO business in near future.
The American Financial firm has issued an apology to its entire customer base and has assured that it has taken all appropriate security measures to curb such digital embarrassments in the future.
Note- US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has been informed about the data breach by the IT staff of Robinhood and it could levy a hefty fine on the commission free stock trading platform for failing to protect the information of its customers.
