OC Finance Company Reveals Access To 885 Million Records: Report

ORANGE COUNTY, CA — First American Financial Corp, the Santa Ana-based title insurance behemoth, hundreds of millions of customers' detailed financial records were accessible for download, according to a report from KrebsOnSecurity.com.

Due to an as of yet undetermined security flaw, anyone with a Web browser could have downloaded detailed financial information of First American Financial Corp. clients, including drivers license images, social security numbers, wire transaction receipts, mortgage and tax records, and banking information, they said.

First American provides title insurance and settlement services to real estate and mortgage industry clients, including home warranties. The website flaw, discovered by Ben Shoval, a real estate developer from Washington State, was stopped by 11 a.m. Pacific Time, on May 24, according to the report.

"The earliest document available referenced a real estate transaction from 2003," Shoval stated. The site returned a search of documents totaling upwards of 885,000,000, he said.

He also stated it was not known how many, if any, records were downloaded from that application.

First American has disabled the site that served the downloadable records, PDFs and post-dated forms for upcoming real estate closings, KrebsonSecurity reported.

A spokesperson for the company issued a statement acknowledging the problem.

"First American learned of a design defect in one of its production applications that made possible unauthorized access to customer data," they told Patch. "Security, privacy and confidentiality are of the highest priority and we are committed to protecting our customers’ information.

"Therefore, the company took immediate action to address the situation and shut down external access to the application. We are currently evaluating what effect, if any, this had on the security of customer information. We have hired an outside forensic firm to assure us that there has not been any meaningful unauthorized access to our customer data."

Over 18,000 people work at First American, and the company earned more than $5.7 billion in 2018.