Erie Insurance employees celebrate a century of steady growth
Erie Insurance serves customers in 12 states and the District of Columbia and employs more than 6,500 people in Erie and field offices.
- Erie Insurance has resumed full business operations one month after a cybersecurity incident.
- Several class-action lawsuits filed against Erie Insurance allege negligence in protecting personal information.
One month to the day after Erie Insurance sustained what the company described as a cybersecurity incident, the company has “resumed full business operations,” according to a statement on July 7.
According to that statement, “Key services and systems have been safely and securely restored and our local agents, claims teams and customer care teams have returned to regular ways of serving customers.”
Perhaps most importantly, according to the company, there is no evidence that customer data was compromised.
“After a thorough forensics investigation conducted by independent cybersecurity specialists, there is no evidence that any sensitive personal information, financial records or legally protected data was breached by the threat actor during this incident,” Erie Insurance said in a statement.
That’s good news for the company and its customers who hold more than 7 million active policies.
The absence of a data breach could also affect the status of more than a dozen class-action lawsuits that have been filed against Erie Insurance over the last month.
Most of those filings claim that the company was negligent in failing to protect personal information.
Some of those lawsuits also claim that the company was the victim of a ransomware attack in which an attacker holds a victim’s computers for ransom.
The company has said for several weeks, however, that there was no evidence of ransomware or ongoing threat activity.
According to an earlier statement from Matthew Cummings, a spokesman for Erie Insurance, the company initiated a “proactive network and system outage to help contain the threat.”
The company’s return to normal was reflected July 7 in an update at the top of its website.
In a space that has contained updates in recent weeks, the company is now reporting: “We have resumed full business operations.”
Erie Insurance, Erie County’s largest employer and the only Fortune 500 company based in Erie, is not the only insurance company to wrestle with a network outage in recent weeks.
Both Aflac and Philadelphia Insurance Companies have worked to rebound from network outages that took place in early June.
The network outage at Erie Insurance happened as the company is marking its 100th anniversary this year.
Contact Jim Martin at jmartin3@gannett.com.