In the digital age, any given week can bring news of a data breach. Companies from Target to The Home Depot to Sony have fallen victim to
The mortgage industry is not immune to these attacks. In 2013, PHH employee information was
Despite these incidents, the mortgage industry has not faced the same level of scrutiny as its peers in retail and other sectors of financial services. But that doesn't mean cyberattacks aren't still happening, said John Hurley, CEO of SmartFile, a company that specializes in secure file management and transfer.
Hurley attributes this to the fact that the mortgage industry features many smaller companies.
"It's happening — we're just not hearing about it because it's not at a large scale," Hurley said.
But what sets the mortgage industry apart from others in Hurley's view is the amount of data that mortgage companies are required to collect by regulators. Data that could make consumers highly vulnerable to identity theft if it got into the wrong hands.
"That's where it gets really scary," he said. "It's not just, here's my Social, here's my date of birth. But it's here's my income and my W-2."
In Hurley's view, the mortgage industry could stand to improve how it handles its files. One key factor: appointing someone within the company who is tasked with monitoring how people store and transfer data. And it's important this role not fall to information technology departments just because they supply the software.
"This is a managerial problem, not really a tech problem," he said.
While Hurley does believe that technology is needed to solve
"Because the consumer has it, there's this sense that it's OK because everyone has it," he said. "People do things based on habit. That's a really hard thing to prevent."
