Citigroup Inc., the third-largest U.S. lender, said cyber attackers got into customer accounts last year as the threat of electronic intrusions increased.
The bank cited data breaches that gave outsiders access to account information or interrupted service, and attacks on systems run by clients that gave the intruders entrance to Citigroup’s systems so they could extract customer data, according to the bank’s annual report to securities regulators. Citigroup said it also suffered denial-of-service attacks, which typically involve outsiders causing a website to crash.
“While Citi was able to detect these prior incidents before they became significant, they still resulted in losses as well as increases in expenditures to monitor against the threat of similar future cyber incidents,” the New York-based bank said today in its filing.
Citigroup said the attacks occurred “recently” without giving specifics on the timing or how many people were affected. Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for Citigroup, declined to comment. The bank said in June that more than 360,000 credit-card accounts, or 1.5 percent of the bank’s total in North America, may have been affected in a hacker breach the previous month.
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