California Public Employees’ Retirement System Compromised by MOVEit Hackers

CalPERS (California Public Employees’ Retirement Systems) is an organization working to provide pension benefits for retirees and health security services for public servants and their survivors. 

CalPERS has been working alongside PBI (Public Research Services/Berwyn Group) to identify member deaths and ensure accuracy in retiree payments and beneficiaries. 

On June 6, 2023, PBI notified CalPERS that they had faced a data breach in their systems due to the MOVEit file transfer application zero-day that was reported earlier this month.

Several reports recently state that many threat groups have been using this vulnerability to exfiltrate sensitive data from organizations worldwide.

PII Involved

CalPERS has acknowledged the notification from PBI and working with cybersecurity investigators to investigate this incident further. Based on the recent announcements, the data breach involves personally identifiable information like 

• First Name and Last Name
• SSN
• Current and former employee names
• Spouse or domestic partner information
• Child or Children’s information

PBI has contacted the law enforcement authorities and confirmed to CalPERS that they had resolved this issue and have taken security measures to prevent these kinds of incidents from happening.

Benefits from CalPERS

So as to compensate for this data breach, CalPERS has announced that they are providing free credit monitoring and restoration services through Experian IdentifyWorks for 2 years. They are also contacting affected individuals and their survivors to get these complementary benefits.

CalPERS confirmed that the data breach only involved information about retirees and their survivors, and no other data was compromised.

CalPERS also informed its customers to be vigilant towards identity theft and unauthorized transactions

MOVEit transfer application vulnerability has affected several organizations and their third-party vendors worldwide.

Organizations are recommended to get a self-study on their company and third-party vendor applications for MOVEit file transfer and patch it immediately before being targeted by any threat actors.

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