It was regular Monday afternoon at XYZ Financial. The staff was relaxed after a good weekend, and all were excited to use the new computer systems the company recently upgraded to. While going through his client’s plan like he did this time every day, John noticed that several accounts were severely depleted of the funds that had been there before the weekend. He began going through statements to see if the clients had taken it out privately, but the withdrawals didn’t show up anywhere in their system. John started to freak out and leaned over his desk to ask his co-worker what to do.
“Hey, Mac. I just saw a bunch of my accounts have thousands of dollars missing from them, but we didn’t authorize any of the changes. What do —”
Mac interrupted him with a surprised tone. “You too? Claire and I have the same issue. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Something wasn’t adding up. “If you guys have that problem too, something’s got to be wrong. I’m going to go talk to Michelle.”
John nervously walked into his boss’ office to explain what was going on. Michele was sitting at her desk going through papers, a frantic look in her eye. “Hey, Michelle. Sorry to spring this on you,
but a few of us on the floor have noticed a bunch of accounts that are out thousands of dollars. We didn’t authorize it, so I was wondering if there was a glitch in the system or something?”
Michelle picked her head up from the papers and motion for John to sit down. “I wish that was the case. We’ve been hacked.”
John felt his eyes widen. “Hacked? What do you mean?”
Michele sighed in disbelief. “I mean, when we threw out all the old computers, there were still hard drives in them and someone stole that information.”
“I thought everyone used that special program to wipe the hard drives?”
“Those programs don’t delete everything. Plus it didn’t help that mostly everyone just threw client forms in the garbage once they didn’t need them. We’re going to have a company meeting about it within the hour.”
“But…” John could barely find words, “what’s going to happen to all the client’s who got affected? A bunch of my accounts that got drained were people’s life savings. I mean, what’s going to happen to them?”
“We’re going to have to figure it out. You can start calling those people to at least give them a heads up.” Michelle started mumbling to herself in frustration. “I told them we should’ve had everything shredded.”
Some other employees watched a now-sullen John walk back to his desk.
“Did Michelle tell you what’s going on?” You could hear the anxiety in Mac’s voice.
John dialed a number on the phone’s keypad. “Yeah… we got hacked.” He shut his eyes tightly as he heard a response on the other end of the line. “Hey, Bobby. It’s John from XYZ Financial.”
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