There has been a fair amount of publicity around the recent illegal hacking into Liberty’s system.
Liberty has issued a media release regarding the hack, which states that they are doing everything possible to ringfence any “fallout”, making use of a number of international IT “experts”.
Liberty has indicated that they will be contacting all intermediaries who have access to the Liberty system to change their passwords as the system security has been changed and tightened up.
They have stressed that there is no danger to policyholder money, nor is there any additional risk to new policyholders. They have also indicated that there is no chance that the hackers could have opened up access to “swim back upstream” into the systems of intermediaries who are linked to Liberty or communicating with them.
They are in the process of developing a list of FAQs with answers, which will be circulated once received. No doubt this will act as something of a “wake up call” to the industry as the realty of cybercrime is brought home.
It should also trigger off some kind of thought around protection of our member’s systems, even if it is as basic as ensuring that all users have a “rigorous” password system (not something like 123456) that calls for an update of the password on a regular basis.
Any queries may be directed to our, National technical portfolio manager, Peter Atkinson on peter@fia.org.za
