For San Francisco Public Press–Nearly a year after a ransomware attack paralyzed Patelco Credit Union, a class action against the nonprofit financial cooperative has been settled for $7.25 million. More than 1 million accounts were affected by the breach.
Dublin-based Patelco has reached a settlement with 12 named plaintiffs in Alameda County Superior Court, said Scott Edward Cole, an Oakland consumer lawyer for Cole & Van Note representing the account holders.
Cole said the plaintiffs are waiting for the court to formally approve the settlement so the documents can be sent to other members of the class after a hearing scheduled for June 10.
Settlement terms include creating a $7.25 million fund to be shared by victims affected by the ransomware attack and system shutdown of Patelco that lasted for more than two weeks last summer.
Patelco has acknowledged that hackers gained access to account holders’ names, dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and email addresses. The credit union has offered complimentary credit-monitoring subscription services to all data breach victims.
Plaintiffs in this case “have various ways of demonstrating that the damages they suffered were traceable to the Patelco data breach,” Cole said. Plaintiffs sued Patelco for negligence and violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act, and “negotiations were adversarial” in nature, according to the settlement.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Public Press found leaked data from the cyberattack posted on the dark web — part of the internet that can be accessed anonymously and is not indexed by search engines — and reached out to some of the people who had their personal information exposed. One person asked not to be contacted again. Another declined to comment and a third person said she was “scared” and was being “cautious.” The Public Press reporter for this story was also affected by the data breach.
RansomHub, the attacker of Patelco, was one of the top ransomware hackers last year, according to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report. Last year, the U.S. saw $16.6 billion in reported losses from internet crime, a 33% increase from the previous year. Data breaches were among the most frequent complaints to the agency.
As they become increasingly commonplace, data breaches remain a serious problem for consumers.
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