Reel FX Animation, a highly successful American computer animation studio, is circulating notices of a data breach sent to impacted individuals.
Reel FX is known for creating the films’ Rumble’, ‘The Book of Life’, ‘Scoob!’, ‘Back to the Outback’, and ‘Free Birds’, and has won many prestigious awards, including Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Emmy Awards.
Samples of notices of breach that were shared with authorities in several American states indicate that the company discovered an intrusion on its systems on June 26, 2022.
Upon investigating the incident, Reel FX found that an unknown actor had gained access to its internal network between June 4 and June 26, for a total of twenty-two days.
Unfortunately, the logs retrieved and analyzed by the firm’s IT team showed that the network intruders managed to access, and in some cases, exfiltrate data from its systems.
“Our cybersecurity forensic experts were successful in containing the event. However, following a thorough review of the impacted information, on August 24, 2022, we determined that some of your personal information may have been involved in the incident,” details the letter sent to affected individuals.
The information that has been compromised as a result of this incident includes the following:
- Full names
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Dates of birth
- Bank accounts and routing numbers
- Social security numbers (SSNs)
- Individual Taxpayer Identification Number
Malicious actors holding the above information could launch successful phishing attacks, scam exposed people via social engineering, or even perform identity theft and bank fraud.
In response to the security incident, Reel FX will cover the cost of 12 months of identity monitoring services through Kroll, which should help impacted individuals mitigate the risks of their exposure.
Those who are overly worried about the consequences of this breach may put their credit file on a security freeze or place a fraud alert on their credit report.
Legal office ‘Turket & Strauss’ has also announced it launched an investigation into the data breach to determine the scope of the incident and explore potential reimbursement pathways.
Reel FX has not clarified if the incident’s impact is limited to only employees or if it also extends to contractors or customers.
Reel FX has worked with giants in the field like Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Netflix, and the Warner Group, so if contract agreements or financial documents were accessed, the impact might extend to other firms.
Additionally, the Texas-based studio is currently working on new projects, and if the threat actor managed to exfiltrate any snippets of these, a potential leak online would be detrimental to their marketing prospect.
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