This is an update about a data security incident that has impacted certain people who have an ACY Securities live trading account.
Our investigations show the personal information (or personal data) about our clients that may have been impacted is limited to:
- Name
- Contact details (such as email, phone number and physical address)
- Date of birth
- Deposit history (aggregate deposits made)
We can confirm that any trading accounts and bank account information clients have with us are safe. They have not been compromised.
We’re extremely concerned this has happened. Keeping the ACY Securities accounts safe is our priority. Please be assured we’ve identified the cause of the incident, contained it, and put a number of measures in place to stop it from happening again.
What happened?
On 11 August 2021, we discovered some of our clients started receiving phone calls from an unknown third party, either selling a trading subscription service or telling clients the ACY retail business is closing and that the ACY group is now focused on our ACY Partner business. Criminals used malware to compromise a computer used by us to access client information.
Before we rectified the issue, they were able to take a limited amount of personal information belonging to some of our account holders. Importantly, the criminals weren’t able to access our trading environment or our financial systems, which are segregated from our client relationship management system. Our clients can continue to have confidence in using our trading systems safely and securely.
What has ACY Securities done to address this?
We immediately launched an investigation. We’re also in communication with the national cyber-crime agencies and data privacy commissioners in our regulated jurisdictions.
Since that date, we have launched two penetration testing reports, whitelist protection, run multiple virus and malware scans on all staff PCs, password resets, replaced staff PCs, increased our firewall protection, moved to more frequent internal PC scans and enabled filtered URL detection.
Also, we have conducted testing which has confirmed that no access to our data has occurred since the incident date above.
ACY Securities will never call you to ask for withdrawals or to remote access your PC
It is important to note that ACY Securities staff will never call you to ask you to make a withdrawal and will never ask you to provide remote access to your PC in order to view your acy.cloud client portal information.
If you get a call from someone claiming to be from ACY and they want to remote access your PC, disconnect the call immediately, and inform us of the incident immediately.
Steps you should consider for you protection going forward
We encourage clients to take the following steps:
- Reset your ACY Securities trading account password and your acy.cloud portal password
- Although we have no reason to suspect that your password has been compromised we strongly recommend that you change your other passwords as a precaution. For example, bank accounts, social media accounts, and email accounts.
- If you believe your personal information has been used by a third party without your authorisation, report it to your local cybercrime agency.
- Contact your bank immediately if you’ve sent money to a scammer or if you think you’ve provided confidential banking information to a scammer.
- Don’t allow any access by remote desktop viewers by any company, even if they claim to be ACY Securities.
- Don’t respond to/click on any suspicious communications from people or organisations that you don’t know.
- Close any online accounts you no longer use.
- Most importantly, please do not provide anyone remote access to your PC, even if they claim to be from ACY Securities.
We understand people will be concerned about this. We encourage you to contact us immediately if you have any suspicions or concerns about any communication you receive, on +61 2 9188 2999 or at support@acy.com.
Finally, we want to reassure you that ACY Securities absolutely remains open for business, fully regulated and here to support your trading needs. If you want to discuss this matter further please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Kind regards,
The ACY Securities team
