Canon Data Breach Affects General Electric’s Current and Former Employees

by Silviu STAHIE on March 25, 2020

General Electric (GE) has revealed that a data breach at Canon Business Process Services (Canon), one of the company’s service providers, exposed details about GE employees, former employees, and other beneficiaries.

Just because the world seems to have stopped to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, doesn’t mean that attackers will stop too. If anything, the number of cybersecurity events has gone up five-fold. Companies are now even more exposed as people work from less secure environments, such as their homes. The number of incidents will likely continue to rise as hackers and other criminals try to take advantage.

GE sent an advisory notifying everyone about the data breach, explaining what happens and what the affected parties should do.

“We were notified on February 28, 2020 that Canon had determined that, between approximately February 3 – 14, 2020, an unauthorized party gained access to an email account that contained documents of certain GE employees, former employees and beneficiaries entitled to benefits that were maintained on Canon’s systems,” reads the advisory.

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The wealth of data exposed included “direct deposit forms, driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, medical child support orders, tax withholding forms, beneficiary designation forms and applications for benefits such as retirement, severance and death benefits with related forms and documents, may have included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, bank account numbers, passport numbers, dates of birth, and other information contained in the relevant forms.”

The good news is that GE systems were not directly impacted and Canon is providing financial assistance to everybody affected if they notify the company by June 30, 2020. People who were informed by the company should take extra precautions, check their credit cards regularly, and make sure their data is not used in any wrongdoing. It’s unclear how many people were affected by the data breach.