Wall Street may want to take another look at its compliance policies. For an industry that claims to monitor every electronic message that comes in and out of its walls, the news that the email addresses of major investment and brokerage firms were among the potential clients of a notorious internet dating site aimed at married men and women must be embarrassing.
Yesterday, Marketwatch reported that among the millions of names, email addresses and credit card numbers that were posted by hackers to shame the clientele of Ashley Madison were the email addresses of several Wall Street firms. The owner/operator of AshleyMadison.com was hacked earlier this year and the data was dumped by hacktivists who targeted the website whose motto is Life is short, have an affair.
As MarketWatch puts it:
Now, in the wake of the cyber attack by on the Ashley Madison site – you know, the site dedicated to helping married people have affairs – some roving hearts are who also work at major investment banks and brokerages.
Here are the financial institutions we searched, and how many associated email addresses we found – bearing in mind that we cannot verify the accuracy of the data:
Wells Fargo – @wellsfargo.com: 175
Bank of America – @bankofamerica.com: 76
Deutsche Bank – @db.com: 73
Citigroup – @citi.com: 51
Goldman Sachs – @gs.com: 45
PNC Bank – @pnc.com: 28
U.S. Bancorp – @usbank.com: 15
Bank of New York Mellon – @bnymellon.com: 14
J.P. Morgan Chase – @jpmchase.com: 9
Capital One – @capitalone.com: 4
As one would expect, the financial giants declined to comment on the news. As a Wells Fargo spokeswoman commented, While we cannot speak to the veracity of the data, as a matter of company policy we require that team members use personal email addresses to conduct personal business.
To be fair, Ashley Madison claims not to verify email accounts and some news reports have reported that the data dump also included phony names and data.
So far, no names from Wall Street firms and whether they used corporate credit cards has been reported.
Perhaps Ashley Madison should amend its motto to Life is short, create a private email account.
