Another day, another data breach.
TransUnion (NYSE:TRU), one of Canada’s two credit reporting agencies, says the personal information of 37,000 Canadians has likely been compromised.
The TransUnion data hack is not as bad as the one that occurred at Canada’s other credit monitoring agency, Equifax Inc., in 2017. That breach exposed the personal and financial information of 147 million people worldwide, including 19,000 Canadians.
Still, the breach of credit reporting agencies, which are supposed to safeguard Canadians information, is not good. In a written statement, TransUnion said that someone fraudulently accessed its data using one of its business customer's login credentials between June and July.
TransUnion has not disclosed what kind of personal information was compromised by the fraudulent login. A credit check by a bank or lender could give access to an individual's name, date of birth, current and former addresses, information on existing credit and loan obligations, credit repayment history and potentially their social insurance number.
The TransUnion incident is just the latest among numerous data breaches in recent years, including the Equifax breach. More recently, Capital One (NYSE: COF) said in July that data of six million Canadians was hacked, including about one million social insurance numbers. Desjardins said in June that the data of 2.7 million accounts was hit with a breach.
TransUnion said it learned of the breach in August and has notified those whose information may have been accessed as well as the privacy commissioners. TransUnion and Equifax collect a variety of financial data to help banks and other lenders figure out how reliably a customer might pay them back.
