The Firewall That Forgot Its Only Job

What’s the first thought that crosses your mind when you think of your bank: biometric scanners, deep-packet inspection, and encryption so thick you’d need a quantum computer and luck to crack it? Don’t blame me for being dramatic. This is what the movies try to sell to us.

But the recent saga of Marquis Software reminds us that you can have the sturdiest vault in the world, but if you hire a third-party bookkeeper who leaves their back window unlatched, the gold is going for a walk anyway.

Marquis Software is the kind of company most people have never heard of, but that hundreds of U.S. banks and credit unions rely on. They handle the “boring” stuff: data analytics, compliance, and customer communications. To perform their job, banks hand them customer details such as names, addresses, dates of birth, and the holy grail of identity theft: Social Security numbers.

On August 14, a ransomware gang didn’t bother trying to pick the lock on the banks’ front doors. Instead, they found a vulnerability in Marquis’s SonicWall firewall. By the time the dust settled, more than 74 financial institutions were checking their pockets and finding them empty.

VeraBank and Artisans’ Bank became the latest to join a growing list of victims notifying thousands of customers that their most sensitive data was now in the hands of unknown actors. Estimates suggest between 788,000 and 1.35 million victims are now looking at their credit reports with newfound anxiety.

While Marquis reportedly paid the ransom (according to a since-deleted letter from one credit union), the damage was done. In the digital world, “paying to get your data back” is like paying a kidnapper to give you a copy of your child while they keep the original in their basement.

The banks did everything right. They didn’t get hacked; their systems remained pristine. But they learned the hard way that your security is only as strong as the most outdated firmware on your vendor’s firewall.

Written by Clement Saudu

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