Two of Canada’s largest banks – Bank of Montreal and CIBC – announced Monday that they have been targeted by hackers and that the personal information of at least 40,000 customers may have been stolen.
CIBC-owned Simplii Financial was the first to announce on Monday morning that fraudsters had accessed the personal and account information of more than 40,000 of the bank's customers.
The bank said it received a tip over the weekend that customer data had been illegally obtained, and after a preliminary investigation, decided to go public with the news.
Bank of Montreal followed CIBC, revealing that it too had received a tip that hackers had stolen data from the bank's customer base. However, BMO executives declined to say how many customers have been impacted by the data security breach. The bank said the hack appears to have originated outside of Canada.
It's unclear where Simplii came up with the 40,000 figure, as that number represents a tiny fraction of the roughly two million customers the bank inherited when CIBC took over Simplii — at the time known as President's Choice Financial — from the Loblaws grocery chain last fall.
