Australia’s Perpetual says ‘tech outage’ affected some funds in cyber incident

(Reuters) – Australian Perpetual 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 and Medibank Ltd.

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.”