Category Archives: First American Title Insurance

SEC settles with First American over massive data leak for nearly $500,000

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The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Tuesday that it has settled charges with First American Financial over its 2019 leak of sensitive customer information that exposed more than 800 million document images. Under the terms of the deal, the heavyweight real estate title insurance company will pay a $487,616 fine. The SEC had charged the company with inadequately disclosing the cybersecurity vulnerability that exposed the information. The digitized records included things like Social Security numbers and bank account statements. First American first made public statements about the vulnerability in May 2019 but the company’s information security personnel had first spotted it in January, and according to the SEC they didn’t fix it and failed to notify company brass. “As a result of First American’s deficient disclosure controls, senior management was completely unaware of this vulnerability and the company’s failure to remediate it,” said Kristina Littman, chief of the SEC Enforcement […]

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Insurer’s huge data exposure draws charges from New York state

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New York regulators have charged an insurer with violating state cybersecurity law for allegedly exposing hundreds of millions of documents that included Americans’ personal data, including Social Security numbers and financial information. The New York State Department of Financial Services announced legal action Wednesday against the First American Title Insurance Company, the second-largest real estate title insurer in the U.S. The company is accused of exposing customers’ Social Security numbers, bank account information, driver’s license numbers and mortgage and tax records through a software vulnerability that went undetected between May 2014 and December 2018. Upon discovering the flaw during a routine security test, the insurance company failed to fix it, DFS alleged. “After the data exposure was discovered by an internal penetration test in December 2018, First American failed to conduct a reasonable investigation into the scope and cause of the exposure, reviewing only 10 of the millions of documents exposed and […]

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