The Servers of The Hartford Insurance Company Gets Hacked Too

According to a notice of warning, hackers have compromised the system of The Hartford insurance company and were able to put in a spywares which steal passwords on few of the company's network server. This was sent to almost three hundred employees, contractors, and only few customers. The insurance company claimed that it learned about the infection in late February and admitted that several servers of its system were hit, including Citrix servers, which is under employees use for remote access to IT systems. A copy of this letter published by The Hartford's letter was posted to its website of the Office of the New Hampshire Attorney General.

The spokeswomen of the company claimed that "It was a very small incident" and that the fortunately victims were only the company’s own employees. But it was also acknowledged that around 10 customers were also affected by this malware, which is reported of W32-Qakbot Trojan kind, she declared. This type of spyware ‘Qakbot’ was first discovered two years ago, and it functions after being planted, by spreading itself from one computer to the others within the network. According to the company necessary steps were taken to cover all of its tracks, as it attempted to record sensitive data while opening up back doors for the hackers, in order to breach the insurance company’s network.

The two decades old insurance company ‘Hartford,’ has more than several thousand employees around the globe, and is said to be one of the largest and finest insurance companies of the country. The Hartford's letters was addressed to all the "users who logged onto an infected server" in the time frame of the virus i.e. 22^nd to 28^th February, 2011.

It was officially stated in the letter that "We do know that the virus has the potential to capture confidential data such as bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, user accounts/logins, passwords, and credit card numbers.” It has not yet been found that how The Hartford network was infected, though security experts claim that hackers usually target the staffers purposefully with malicious e-mail, in order to trick them into downloading malicious Trojan horse programs. Such viruses are believed to be widespread and systematically logged.