An employee of Morgan Stanley has been fired after his alleged online posting
of information related to about 900 Wealth Management clients.
“Overall, partial account information of up to 10 percent of all Wealth Management clients was stolen,” Morgan Stanley said in a statement.
Morgan Stanley said it “promptly removed” the information, which included account numbers and names, when the bank found out about the posting. Passwords and social security numbers were not stolen and there is no
evidence of any financial losses to any clients, said the global financial
services firm.
According to The Wall Street Journal, financial adviser Galen Marsh was terminated.
“The firm is taking the precaution of notifying all potentially affected clients and instituting enhanced security procedures including fraud monitoring on these accounts,” said Morgan Stanley, adding that it “takes extremely seriously its responsibility to safeguard client data, and is working with the appropriate authorities to conduct and conclude a thorough investigation of this incident.”
According to the results of a survey last year by PwC, CSO magazine, the CERT Division of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon and the US Secret Service, 49 percent of respondents said they have a plan in place to combat and deal with insider threats while about one-third said insider cyber crimes are more costly than incidents from the outside, such as hackers.
Respondents said cyber incidents caused by employees increased 10 percent.
“Based on my experience with the [Chelsea] Manning and [Edward] Snowden leaks, and with managing one of the leading insider program’s within the intelligence community, I have seen that organizations sometimes overlook the threat from within their own business ecosystem,” said Sean Joyce, PwC principal and former deputy director of the FBI. “The effects can be devastating.”
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Chad Hemenway is Managing Editor of Advisen News. He has more than 15 years of journalist experience at a variety of online, daily, and weekly publications. He has covered P&C insurance news since 2007, and he has experience writing about all P&C lines as well as regulation and litigation. Chad won a Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Single Article in 2014 for his coverage of the insurance implications of traumatic brain injuries and Best News Coverage in 2013 for coverage of Superstorm Sandy. Contact Chad at 212.897.4824 or [email protected].
