First American Data Breach Lawsuit
Buy or sell a home? Use First American for closing or title insurance?
Our attorneys have filed the first nationwide class action lawsuit against First American Financial Corp for leaking 885 million files of mortgage deals going back to 2003. The files included bank account numbers, tax records, Social Security numbers, and images of drivers licenses, according to the complaint. The leaked documents were publicly available without authentication to anyone with a web browser, according to the complaint.
To read a copy of the class action complaint, click here.
Use First American?
If you bought or sold a home and used First American Financial Corp as your closing agency or for title insurance, you may be impacted. Contact us for a free consultation.
Krebs Discovers Massive Data Breach at First American
Cybersecurity researcher Brian Krebs says that he discovered the data breach because a real estate developer contacted him, saying that once you know the hyperlink of a valid URL on First American’s website (firstam.com), you can view any document on the website simply by altering a single digit in the URL. The breach exposed 885 million files dating back 16 years, reports Krebs.
Krebs says that he informed the company about the data leak, and they took down the entire website as of May 24, 2019 at 2pm EST. But some records dating back to March 2017 were archived by web crawlers and are still available on archive.org, reports Krebs.
The information exposed by the 885 million records is a “virtual gold mine for phishers and scammers,” says Krebs.
The incident was the latest example of an under-the-radar company that retained enormous amounts of sensitive personal and financial data but was not effectively protecting that information.
In 2017, Equifax, one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies, said the information for more than 145 million consumers — including Social Security numbers — was stolen.
Our law firm was appointed by the court in the Equifax data breach lawsuit to help lead the litigation.
Our Data Breach Lawsuit Experience
Our attorneys recently won two prestigious awards for our work in data breach lawsuits. Eric Gibbs received a 2018 “MVP” award and 2019 CLAY award (“California Attorney: Lawyer of the Year”) for his work successfully representing data breach victims.
Our attorneys served in a court-appointed leadership role in the Anthem data breach class action, and helped achieve a $115 million settlement for victims of the Anthem data breach. The settlement received final approval from the court in August 2018.
We’ve also achieved landmark results in our past data breach cases, including the Adobe data breach litigation, UCSF data breach lawsuit, and Health Net of California data breach litigation.
First American customer?
Our Data Breach Attorneys
Eric Gibbs
A founding partner at the firm, Eric has negotiated groundbreaking settlements that favorably shaped laws and resulted in business practice reforms.
View full profileDavid Berger
David represents consumers in data breach, privacy, and financial services litigation. He has prosecuted some of the largest privacy cases nationwide.
View full profileAmanda Karl
Amanda represents employees, consumers, and sexual assault survivors in complex class actions. She also leads the firm’s Voting Rights Task Force.
View full profileAaron Blumenthal
Aaron represents consumers, employees, and whistleblowers in class actions and other complex litigation.
View full profileAbout Us
