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Phoenix666 writes:

If you've bought shares using retail broker Scottrade in the last few years, you may want to get in touch with the biz because its servers have been plundered by hackers unknown.

The firm only found out about the data breach when the Feds got in contact to let it know. It now appears that 4.6 million customer accounts have been compromised. The IT security breach occurred between "late 2013 and early 2014", and the intruders primarily went after customer names and addresses, we're told.

"Although Social Security numbers, email addresses, and other sensitive data were contained in the system accessed, it appears that contact information was the focus of the incident," the firm said in a statement.

"We have no reason to believe that Scottrade's trading platforms or any client funds were compromised. Client passwords remained fully encrypted at all times and we have not seen any indication of fraudulent activity as a result of this incident. We have secured the known intrusion point and conducted an internal data forensics investigation on this incident with assistance from a leading computer security firm."

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