Steinbach Credit Union (SCU) Responds to phone line incident

On November 12, Steinbach Credit Union (SCU) was made aware that, due to an issue with their telephone service provider, some calls made to their Member Contact Centre were redirected by an unauthorized third party to a phone number outside of the organization. The credit union confirmed their service provider fixed their error and has re-secured SCU’s phone system.

“At SCU, safeguarding our members’ information is essential to us and we take this incident very seriously,” says Glenn Friesen, CEO at SCU. Friesen adds, “We deeply regret the concern this will inevitably cause our members. We are committed to working with impacted members and communicating updates as we know more.”

In response to this situation, SCU has mobilized an incident response team to address the situation quickly and is proactively enhancing internal processes to mitigate the risk to its members. Chief Information and Technology Officer at SCU, Andy Alguire, says, “Based on our investigation to date, it’s important to note that only member names, phone numbers, and call dates may have been disclosed as a result of this incident.” Alguire concludes, “SCU’s technical and security team is working closely with our service provider to understand how this happened and use these learnings to further strengthen our defenses.”

SCU says they are continuing to investigate the details with their service provider and will provide updates as they become available.