Fidelity National Financial ‘All Locked Up’ After Cyberattack

Fidelity National Financial (FNF) says a recent cyberattack has disrupted its operations.

The company, which provides title insurance settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries, revealed the attack in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing on Tuesday (Nov. 21).

The filing said FNF began an investigation promptly after discovering the breach Sunday (Nov. 19), hiring experts, notifying law enforcement and taking steps to contain the problem.

“Among other containment measures, we blocked access to certain of our systems, which resulted in disruptions to our business,” the filing said.

“For example, the services we provide related to title insurance, escrow and other title-related services, mortgage transaction services, and technology to the real estate and mortgage industries, have been affected by these measures.”

The company added that its majority-owned subsidiary, insurance solutions provider F&G Annuities & Life,, was not impacted by the incident. FNF says its investigation — which is still underway — shows an “unauthorized third party accessed certain FNF systems and acquired certain credentials.”

A report Wednesday (Nov. 22) by TechCrunch cites an earlier story from Real Estate News that claims the attack stopped scheduled closings, which left agents and homebuyers “scrambling for solutions” as they have been informed that the systems needed to carry out their transactions won’t be available until Sunday.

Meanwhile, a source who said they work at a company that does business with FNF told TechCrunch that they heard FNF “decided to shut down their network, systems, and even their email […] in an attempt to scrub their servers in Jacksonville and prevent any issues.”

Another source, apparently an IT worker at a company that uses FNF, told TechCrunch that they heard FNF was “all locked up.”

The news comes as financial institutions (FIs) are facing substantial hurdles as they try to fight fraud, among them data breaches, the accelerated pace of payment transactions and complex regulatory demands.

That’s according to “Increasing Fraud Heightens Need for Newer, Better Technologies,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Hawk AI report.

The study found that the proportion of FIs with assets of $5 billion or more who reported cyberattacks and data breaches has almost doubled in 2023 when compared to 2022, from nearly 8% to 16%. In addition, this year, 14% of them point to the heightened speed of payments as their chief challenge, a stark contrast to the 3.7% who had this concern last year.

“On the upside, the share of FIs citing complex regulatory requirements as their top challenge has slightly reduced from the 21% that expressed the same concern in 2022 to 14% in 2023,” PYMNTS wrote last month. “Similarly, the 15% of FIs that cited increasing sophistication of fraud schemes in 2022 has reduced to 10% in 2023.”