SunTrust Data Breach

SunTrust Bank quietly announced Friday, April 20th, 2018 that a former employee was working with a “criminal third party” and may have passed along information from as many as 1.5 million client accounts.

Affected customers appear to be being notified by email with this message:

Dear <CUSTOMER>,

SunTrust cares deeply about your privacy and the security of your information. We became aware of potential theft by a former employee of information from some of our client contact lists, as we shared in a news release on Friday, April 20, 2018. We are still investigating in cooperation with law enforcement. We apologize that you are one of our clients who may have been affected, as your continued trust is critical to us.

Given this, we are proactively notifying you that certain information, including your name, address, phone number and certain account balances may have been affected. The contact lists did not include personally identifying information, such as your social security number, account number, PIN, User ID, password, or driver’s license number.

Your confidence is at the core of our purpose, and we want you to know that we have heightened our monitoring of your accounts and increased other related security measures. While we have not identified significant fraudulent activity, know that you will not be responsible for any fraud on your SunTrust accounts as a result of this incident.

At no cost to you, we recommend that you enroll in the IDnotify(tm) service provided by Experian(r) which includes:

*   A personalized Experian credit report at signup;
*   Experian Credit Monitoring for indicators of fraud;
*   Dark Web monitoring;
*   Identity Restoration specialists available for immediate help to address credit and non-credit related fraud; and
*   $1 Million Identity Theft Insurance reimbursement for certain costs associated with a stolen identity event, subject to the terms of the policy.

To enroll in IDnotify:

*   Log into your Online Banking account at www.suntrust.com and follow the instructions; or
*   If you do not have an Online Banking account, please visit https://www.suntrust.com/identity-protection and follow the instructions.

To best protect your information, we recommend you consider additional steps that can be found here<https://www.suntrust.com/fraud-and-security-department>. You also will receive more information from SunTrust in the mail.

Protecting your information is a top priority for SunTrust, and we appreciate the opportunity to serve you.

Mark A. Chancy
Vice Chairman

You can probably expect no to very little follow up on this, ever. As always, one of the best things you can do to protect yourself is to freeze your credit. In this case, we’d recommend checking your balance every day along with recent transactions as well.

Remember, ACH and checking fraud do not carry the same protections as credit cards. Also, while SunTrust says that personally identifying information was not leaked it’s nearly impossible to know after the fact, which this finding appears to be.