Capita cyber-attack: USS pension fund members’ details may have been stolen
Almost half a million members of the giant USS lecturers’ pension fund may have had their personal details stolen during the recent cyber-attack on the outsourcing firm Capita.
The company, which also runs services for the NHS and military, has previously said that the attack on its servers in March may have resulted in a “limited” amount of data being compromised.
But on Friday, the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), which invests almost £90bn on behalf of academics, said it could not be certain whether information about 470,000 active, deferred and retired members had been taken.
It said the details that may have been stolen by the hackers included these members’ titles, initials, names, dates of birth, National Insurance numbers and pension fund membership numbers. Capita manages USS’s pension system and support.
“While Capita cannot currently confirm if this data was definitively ‘exfiltrated’ (i.e., accessed and/or copied) by the hackers, they recommend we work on the assumption it was,” USS said in a statement.
“We are awaiting receipt of the specific data from Capita, which we will in turn need to check and process.
“We will be writing to each of the members affected by this – and, where applicable, their employers – as soon as possible to make them aware, to apologise for any distress or inconvenience caused, and to provide ongoing support and advice.”
USS said it was “sorry” that its members had been affected, adding that it was “proactively engaging with Capita in respect of their ongoing investigations and are considering the next steps available to us”.
Bill Galvin, the USS group chief executive, said: “Having been told yesterday [11 May] that Capita could not guarantee the security of certain files, we’ve
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