14 DAY TRIAL // At the beginning of the week, US-based financial institution Capital One began to inform its customers that their personal information had been accessed and distributed by a former employee to a third-party.
It is unclear when the incident occurred, or whether it is related to the one from last year, but these notifications started to be sent out on March 16.
Company offers two-year free credit card monitoring service
The employee was still working for Capital One at the time of the event, and following the disclosure of the data to the unauthorized entity, fraudulent charges were recorded for the accounts of the impacted customers.
The financial company, which is a member of Fortune 500 and offers credit cards, money loans for different purposes, as well as banking and savings products, replaced the cards used for the illegal transactions with new ones.
To protect its clients from identity theft and fraud, Capital One makes available a complimentary subscription for two years to a selected credit monitoring service. People affected by the incident can sign up for this until April 30, 2015, said Douglas Woodard Vice President of Operations at the company.
No word on the type of data leaked
This disclosure letter was shared with the Office of the Attorney General in Vermont and did not provide any information on the type of data leaked to the third party, but it can be assumed that it is sensitive in nature.
Law enforcement is currently involved and the company has increased security in order to prevent events of this nature from happening in the future.
In the communication sent out last year it was mentioned that the former employee only accessed areas storing personal details of customers, which consisted in names, account numbers, and social security numbers.
At that time, Woodard said that law enforcement had been notified and that no suspicious transactions were recorded as a result of the unauthorized access.