U.S. money transfer giant MoneyGram has confirmed that hackers stole its customers’ personal information and transaction data during a cyberattack last month.

The company said in a statement Monday that an unauthorized third party “accessed and acquired” customer data during the cyberattack on September 20. The cyberattack — the nature of which remains unknown — sparked a week-long outage that resulted in the company’s website and app falling offline.

MoneyGram says it serves over 50 million people in more than 200 countries and territories each year.

In its statement Monday, MoneyGram said its investigation is in its “early stages” and is working to determine which consumers were affected by this issue. The company did not say how many customers might be affected. When reached, MoneyGram spokesperson Sydney Schoolfield did not comment beyond the company’s statement.

The stolen customer data includes names, phone numbers, postal and email addresses, dates of birth, and national identification numbers. The data also includes a “limited number” of Social Security numbers and government identification documents, such as driver’s licenses and other documents that contain personal information, like utility bills and bank account numbers. MoneyGram said the types of stolen data will vary by individual.

MoneyGram said that the stolen data also included transaction information, such as dates and amounts of transactions, and, “for a limited number of consumers, criminal investigation information (such as fraud).”

TechCrunch previously reported that MoneyGram had subsequently notified U.K. data protection regulators of a data breach as required under U.K. law.

Source: MoneyGram says hackers stole customers’ personal information and transaction data | TechCrunch

And… why was this data not encrypted?

[…] A pro-Palestenian hacktivist group called SN_BLACKMETA has taken responsibility for the hack on X and Telegram. “They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel,’” the group said on X when someone asked them why they’d gone after the Archive.

The group elaborated on its reasoning in a now-deleted post on X. Jason Scott, an archivist at the Archive, screenshotted it and shared it. “Everyone calls this organization ‘non-profit’, but if its roots are truly in the United States, as we believe, then every ‘free’ service they offer bleeds millions of lives. Foreign nations are not carrying their values beyond their borders. Many petty children are crying in the comments and most of those comments are from a group of Zionist bots and fake accounts,” the post said.

SN_BLACKMETA also claimed responsibility for a six-day DDoS attack on the Archive back in May. “Since the attacks began on Sunday, the DDoS intrusion has been launching tens of thousands of fake information requests per second. The source of the attack is unknown,” Chris Freeland, Director of Library Services at the Archive said in a post about the attacks back in May.

SN_BLACKMETA launched its Telegram channel on November 23 and has claimed responsibility for a number of other attacks including a six-day DDoS run at Arab financial institutions and various attacks on Israeli tech companies in the spring.

It’s been a hard year for the Internet Archive. In July, the site went down due to “environmental factors” during a major heat wave in the U.S. Last month it lost an appeal in the lawsuit Hachette and other major publishers launched against it.

“If our patrons around the globe think this latest situation is upsetting, then they should be very worried about what the publishing and recording industries have in mind,” Kahle said in a post about the DDoS attack in May. “I think they are trying to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere. But just as we’re resisting the DDoS attack, we appreciate all the support in pushing back on this unjust litigation against our library and others.”

[…]

Source: Hacktivists Claim Responsibility for Taking Down the Internet Archive

Well done SN_BLACKMETA – you have just played into Israels hands. People who were on the fence about Palestine in the West well definitely now lean towards Israel and away from Palestine 🙁