TD Ameritrade became the latest financial firm to hit the headlines after suffering a data breach, with over 6.3 million customer records stolen. Other financial institutions have also reported data breaches recently, including JPMorgan, Fidelity Investments and Ameriprise Financial.These incidents generally stemmed from stolen laptops or careless employees (who, in the case of JPMorgan, threw a bunch of clients' financial paperwork in the garbage in the street). So what makes TD Ameritrade's breach so different? Well, first, this wasn't a case of a stolen laptop, a scenario which everyone knows unfortunately happens. What is worrying here is the fact that malicious code was actually found on the company's server. Second, the breach lay undetected for weeks — or at least until phishers started trying to use the data they had stolen and customers started receiving SPAM.
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