On November 12, 2025, a major financial technology vendor, SitusAMC, known for providing core services to over 1,500 banks, mortgage lenders, state agencies, and pension funds, suffered a targeted cyberattack. Hackers exfiltrated huge volumes of customer data, including critical accounting records and legal agreements for top-tier institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley.
While the attack remains under FBI investigation, it exposes the new reality we’re living in today: traditional security architectures are structurally incapable of protecting the hyper-connected, AI-powered data environments that define modern financial services.
The SitusAMC breach isn’t just another breach. It’s signaling that hard conversations need to be had now about the security blind spots that exist in data across the industry and that are at risk because of the introduction of AI.
In the SitusAMC breach, attackers bypassed existing controls not by deploying ransomware or destructive malware, but by silently siphoning data from core, existing, and fully functional systems. This is a profoundly important point.
Financial data environments have dramatically changed in the last 10 years, especially in how information moves between banks, providers, SaaS platforms, and compliance systems at a blistering pace. According to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 30% of all breaches now involve third-party vendors. That’s double the rate from just one year ago. The financial sector, despite spending billions annually on cybersecurity, remains acutely vulnerable to breaches that exploit the seams between organizations rather than their perimeters.
Information flows continuously between banks, vendors, SaaS platforms, compliance systems, and increasingly, AI-powered automation tools, often at speeds that outpace human oversight. Legacy DLP tools and perimeter defenses were not designed to detect and control these nuanced, multi-hop data movements, let alone the AI-driven automation increasingly present in modern workflows.
Our perspective is clear: Without visibility into which entities (customers, partners, human users, and AI agents) are accessing or transforming sensitive records, financial institutions and their vendors are flying blind. Incidents like the SitusAMC breach often expose not just regulated information, but entire webs of third-party relationships, downstream systems, and hidden data flows.
Where legacy security fails:
This incident demonstrates the importance of implementing data security programs and processes that were built with AI in mind, particularly because protecting unstructured data, across email, SaaS platforms, collaboration tools, and especially AI systems, requires intelligent, real-time, and entity-aware controls.
What is needed?
For institutions handling sensitive financial, legal, and customer data, a single weak link, such as an under-protected vendor or an unsanctioned AI workflow, can trigger industry-wide exposure. Modern adaptive content security is no longer optional; it’s the foundation for resilience, regulatory compliance, and customer trust.
The proliferation of sophisticated breaches shows that multi-channel, context-aware, and AI-aligned data security is now a baseline requirement, not a future aspiration. Bonfy.AI is ready to help financial organizations move beyond reactive, fragmented controls and into a future defined by proactive protection, operational agility, and sustainable innovation.
For financial institutions rethinking their data protection strategy after the latest breach, the time to act is now. The alarm bell has already sounded.
Learn how Bonfy provides the unified, precise, and adaptive security needed for today’s digital finance environment. Request a demo today.