Western Union is sending letters to customers that their personal information may have been stolen after hackers got into a third-party database.
The Register broke the the story Tuesday afternoon:
"A Register reader, who wished to remain anonymous, showed us a copy of a letter dated January 31 that he received from the money-transfer outfit. The missive admitted that a supposedly secure data storage company used by Western Union was compromised: a database full of the wire-transfer giant's customer records was vulnerable to plundering, and hackers were quick to oblige.
'We have discovered that some of your information may have been accessed without authorization as a result of a computer intrusion against an external vendor system formerly used by Western Union for secure data storage,' the letter read."
Western Union has confirmed the hack and says it immediately switched third-party vendors and moved data away from the hacked vendor. We do not, at this point, know how large of a hack this was or exactly what types of data were taken.
This news came just hours after Western Union's CFO announced the company is testing possible collaboration with digital currency company Ripple.
