Quincy Pension Loses $3.5 Million After Cyberattack

A growing number of pensions are becoming targets of cybercrime.

Quincy Pension Loses After Cyber Attack
A phishing scheme is costing the public pension for city employees of Quincy, Massachusetts, $3.5 million.

One year ago, in February 2021, an investment manager at the pension received an email from a former employee’s email account with instructions for a wire transfer. The investment manager made the transfer, not realizing that the email account had been hacked by a cybercriminal. The story of the hack was finally released to the public last week in Quincy newspaper The Patriot Ledger.

It took months for the Quincy Retirement Board to find out about the attack, and it didn’t report the issue to the state’s Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission until October 2021. The retirement board has now been placed under investigation by the Commission, and the board may not make any new investments until the investigation is over. This process will likely take months.

Members of the pension fund can rest assured that the attack is not expected to impact their benefits, since it is a relatively small percentage of the fund’s total assets. The pension had a market value of more than $370 million in 2019, the latest available data.

Want the latest institutional investment industry
news and insights? Sign up for CIO newsletters.

There have been several notable cyberattacks on pensions this past year, including on the Missouri teacher’s pension, which was also the victim of a hacked email address.

Experts like Alan Brill, senior managing director of cyber risk at Kroll, have said that the best way a pension can protect itself is by pre-emptively instituting protocols and preparing for a hack. He also recommended that pensions implement some sort of 24/7 monitoring system.  

Related Stories:

How Can Pensions Best Protect Against Cybersecurity Threats?

Missouri Teachers’ Pension Hit by Cyberattack

SEC Settles With Eight Firms Over Inadequate Cybersecurity Measures

Tags: , , , , ,

Wall Street Tonic: Russia Claims It Is Withdrawing Some Military Units

The prospect of de-escalation from the Ukraine border, as yet unproven, buoys stocks.

Can it be true? Markets this morning are up on the news that some Russian forces have been withdrawn from the Ukraine border.

The S&P 500 climbed 1.2% on the news, along with other major stock indexes, despite another report showing inflation was heating up.

The Kremlin said today that some troops are returning to their regular bases after completing drills. NATO, however, responded that it has yet to see evidence of such a pullback. It’s unclear what Russian units are involved, where their home bases are, and how close they are to Ukraine.

US intelligence has said that Russia may attack imminently, and American officials’ families have been evacuated from Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly denied that an invasion is planned, and it’s styled its massing of military might on three sides of Ukraine as an exercise only. 

For more stories like this, sign up for the CIO Alert newsletter.

Meanwhile, the Producer Price Index increased 9.7% in January from 12 months before, and 1% from December, according to a US Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement this morning. The increase from December was the largest in eight months.

Analysts speculated that the market already expects a Federal Reserve drive to boost interest rates, so the PPI data was not surprising to the stock market—while the prospect of Russian de-escalation is a welcome relief, if it proves true.

«