Australia's Perpetual says 'tech outage' affected some funds in cyber incident (updated)

TECHNOLOGY ONE

21/06/2023 07:56

(Adds quote in paragraph 2, background in paragraph 3, further
details in paragraphs 3 and 4)
       June 21 (Reuters) - Australian Perpetual  PPT.AX  on
Wednesday confirmed an extended tech outage over an IT security
incident, affecting some of its funds, though the fund manager
reaffirmed that all its client investments and its own systems
were unaffected and secure. 
    "Perpetual's listed products, institutional mandates,
Pendal, Perpetual Corporate Trust, Perpetual Wrap clients, and
all of our international asset management businesses are not
affected," a Perpetual spokesperson said.
    Since the onset of September last year, the country's
corporate industry has seen an alarming uptick in cybersecurity
incidents, with some of the latest targets being TechnologyOne
Ltd  TNE.AX  and Medibank Ltd  MPL.AX . 
        In Perpetual's case, one of its third-party unit
registry systems was compromised, impacting clients' access to
its main investor login portal myPerpetual, the company said in
a statement.
    However, the company on Wednesday confirmed its core systems
were restored and processing of client transactions, including
payment of withdrawals, recommenced. 
    The outage impacted about 45,000 clients and was limited to
its Asset Management and Wealth Management divisions' Investment
Funds, WealthFocus, and select products distributed in
Australia, it added.
    For the time being, in order to move to a more secure
environment, Perpetual said it disconnected from the
third-party's systems "when we became aware of the incident and
are currently working with the registry provider to rebuild the
system." 
          
  

 (Reporting by Roushni Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Varun H K
and Janane Venkatraman)
 ((Roushni.Nair@thomsonreuters.com;))