Loandepot partially restores systems, but still hobbled by breach

Loandepot announced Thursday it restored some of its systems following a cyber breach that hit the lender in early January. Nonetheless, fallout from the attack continues to weigh down on the lender and servicer's operations.

Mellohome's website, the MyLoandepot customer portal and the HELOC portal have been rebooted, the company wrote on its website. Loandepot's servicing customer portal is also back online with limited functionality. It remains unclear what other systems are still down. A company spokesman declined to comment. 

In the past week, current customers of the mortgage shop, which has a servicing portfolio with an unpaid principal balance close to $144 billion, have complained across different social media channels that they cannot make payments on their mortgage and therefore they may incur late fees. According to Loandepot's website, late fees will not be assessed until after Jan. 25.

Others have claimed that their personal identifiable information has been leaked as a result of the cyber attack. Loandepot would not provide commentary. 

The cyber breach has also impeded on the lender making timely payments on its warehouse lines with Citibank and JPMorgan Chase, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Friday said.

As a result, the payment date on the two warehouse lines have been updated from Jan. 12 to Jan. 22 "to allow the Company to finalize the payment amount due under the Base Indenture in light of the cybersecurity incident," the lender said.

The cyber incident was detected at least on Jan. 4, an SEC filing shows. Four days later the lender announced it "launched an investigation with assistance from leading cybersecurity experts, and began the process of notifying applicable regulators and law enforcement."

Loandepot's breach is the latest in a string of attacks on companies in the financial services space, including mortgage lender and servicer Mr. Cooper, First American Financial and Fidelity National Financial.

One of the common themes in almost all of the other breaches is that personal identifiable information has been compromised. Fidelity revealed that PII, including Social Security numbers of 1.3 million customers were exposed in the cyber attack, which occurred on Nov. 19. Meanwhile, 14.7 million former and current Mr. Cooper customers may have had their data stolen.

Both companies are facing class action suits related to the data breaches. The main premise of litigation filed against both companies is that the exposure of PII will forever hobble consumers by putting them at risk of fraud.