Hackers Hit ‘Necessary Plumbing’ of Big Bank Mortgage Operations

A cyberattack may have targeted data of some of America’s biggest banks.

As The New York Times (NYT) reported Saturday (Nov. 22), the attack wasn’t on the banks themselves but on vendor SitusAMC, which helps lenders originate and collect money from real estate loans and mortgages.

In a statement on its website, SitusAMC said it became aware of the incident on Nov. 12 and has since determined that “certain information” from its systems was compromised, including corporate data such as accounting records and legal agreements and potentially data related to some of its clients’ customers.

“Upon becoming aware of the incident, we commenced an investigation with the assistance of leading experts, notified (and continue to cooperate with) federal law enforcement authorities, and began taking measures to assess and contain the incident,” the statement said.

“The incident is now contained and our services are fully operational. No encrypting malware was involved.”

Sources told NYT that JPMorgan Chase, Citi and Morgan Stanley are among the banks notified by SitusAMC that their client data may have been taken. A spokesperson for JPMorgan told NYT it had not been directly hacked.

PYMNTS has contacted Morgan Stanley for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. A spokesperson for Citi declined to comment.

The report included a statement from FBI Director Kash Patel: “While we are working closely with affected organizations and our partners to understand the extent of potential impact, we have identified no operational impact to banking services.”

NYT noted that while cybersecurity incidents in the business world aren’t unusual, this breach has caused concern on Wall Street as SitusAMC holds a large collection of personal data found on loan applications, including Social Security numbers.

“If you go down the top 20 banks, if you make commercial real estate and residential loans, you probably have a relationship with Situs,” said Jon Winick, CEO of Clark Street Capital, a company that advises lenders. “It’s necessary plumbing for the commercial and residential real estate market. They do a lot of important but nonsexy things.”

In other cybersecurity news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about digital threats to physical supply chains, citing data from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Vendors and Vulnerabilities: The Cyberattack Squeeze on Mid-Market Firms.”

That report found that vendors and supply chains are a weak spot in mid-market defenses, with 38% of invoice fraud cases and 43% of phishing attacks happening as a result of compromised vendors.

“After all, in a world where the password to the Louvre video security system that was breached by attackers was simply ‘Louvre,’ exploiting the trust firms place in software is becoming second nature to attackers,” PYMNTS wrote.