Morgan Stanley discloses data breach that resulted from Accellion FTA hacks

Morgan Stanley suffered a data breach that exposed sensitive customer data, and it became the latest known casualty of hackers exploiting a series of now-patched vulnerabilities in Accellion FTA, a widely used third-party file-transfer service.

The data obtained included names, addresses dates of birth, social security numbers, and affiliated corporate company names, Morgan Stanley said in a letter first reported by Bleeping Computer. A third-party service called Guidehouse, which provides account maintenance services to the financial services company, was in possession of the data at the time. Unknown hackers obtained the data by exploiting a series of hacks that came to light in December and January.

What took so long?

Morgan Stanley stated: