Citigroup Inc. has announced that the information to connected to 200,000 North American cardholder accounts has been accessed by hackers when they breached the bank’s network in May.
According to Citigroup, the breach was detected in early May and allowed the hackers to view the names, contact information, and account numbers of customers. However, it assures customers that other forms of personal information, such as social security numbers, birthdates, as well as the card security codes (CVV) and expiration dates of the cards were not revealed. This cyber attack is only the latest in a long string made against large multinational companies.
An email released by American Citi spokesman Sean Kevelighan said that “We are contacting customers whose information was impacted. Citi has implemented enhanced procedures to prevent a recurrence of this type of event.” That said, no further details were to be disclosed in order to help to preserve the security of those particular customers.
Citibank has admitted that they have yet to discover how the breach happened. A Hong Kong spokesman for the company, James Griffiths, explained that among North American cardholders, 1 percent of the total 21 million customers throughout the continent were affected by the cyber attack.
The number of high profile organizations that have been suffering from this type of attack has been increasing sharply over the last few months. Sony recently suffered a number of attacks which allowed the personal information contained within 77 million of its network accounts to be accessed. Similarly, last week Google’s Gmail accounts were attacked by hackers who appeared to have been located in China and who were targeting the specific accounts of senior American government officials.