Class action lawsuits are rocking the real estate industry right now, from the earth-shattering Burnett v NAR commissions suit to Rocket Mortgage being sued for alleged telemarketing “overload.”
Yet another case has been added to the docket, with Fidelity National Financial and its mortgage subsidiary LoanCare as the defendants. On November 21, 2023, Fidelity was the subject of a cyberattack that resulted in an almost week-long system-wide outage for the company and its customers; in-progress mortgage transactions were stalled.
The culprit was soon discovered to be the ransomware group ALPHV/BlackCat, who took responsibility in an online post the following day.
Fidelity reported that the incident was “contained” as of November 26 (including in a filing on the incident with the SEC), which also saw user functionality restored.
However, many of Fidelity’s customers are not ready to forgive and forget; the class action lawsuit alleges that the company had been negligent in safeguarding their data from this sort of attack.
The suit was filed on Tuesday, December 12, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for Central California. The filing was done by Teneika Tillis, a LoanCare servicing client and class representative who believes her personal information was compromised in the cyberattack.
“The data breach itself and information defendants have disclosed about the breach to date, including its length, the need to remediate defendants’ cybersecurity and the sensitive nature of the impacted data, collectively demonstrate defendants failed to implement reasonable measures,” Tillis said in a recent National Mortgage News story.
Fidelity’s woes are not an isolated incident; mortgage servicer giant Mr. Cooper was compromised in October 2023 and reports that around 14 million customers were compromised in this cyberattack.
Follow RISMedia for updates about this ongoing class-action litigation.
