JPMorgan: Data breach affected 76M households

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

A huge cyber attack against JPMorgan Chase & Co. this summer has compromised customer information for about 76 million households and 7 million small businesses, the bank said Thursday.

The New York-based bank said that names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of customers were stolen from the company’s servers, but only Chase customers who use certain websites or mobile apps were affected. Those websites were Chase.com, JPMorganOnline, ChaseMobile and JPMorgan Mobile.

JPMorgan said there’s no evidence that the data breach included account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers or dates of birth. It also said it has not seen any unusual customer fraud stemming from the data breach.

JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank by assets, has been working with law-enforcement officials to investigate the cyber attack.

The bank discovered the intrusion on its computer servers in mid-August and has since determined that the breach began as early as June, said spokeswoman Patricia Wexler.

“We have identified and closed the known access paths,” she said, declining to elaborate.

The company also disabled compromised accounts and reset passwords of all its technology employees, Wexler said.

In a post on its Chase.com website, the bank told customers that it doesn’t believe they need to change their password or account information.

The breach is the latest in a series of data thefts that have hit financial firms.

Last year, four Russian nationals and a Ukrainian were charged in what has been called the largest hacking and data breach scheme ever prosecuted in the United States. They were accused of running a hacking organization that penetrated computer networks of more than a dozen major U.S. and international corporations over seven years.