Fintech giant Marquis is suing its firewall provider SonicWall, claiming that an earlier breach allowed hackers to steal sensitive information about customer firewalls that led to a ransomware attack on Marquis\u2019 network.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit, filed Monday<\/a> in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, seeks a jury trial. It claims the 2025 breach at SonicWall \u201cexposed critical security information for Marquis and every customer that used SonicWall\u2019s firewall cloud backup service.\u201d<\/p>\n Marquis\u2019 chief executive Satin Mirchandani told TechCrunch in a statement that SonicWall allegedly failed to secure its backup service, which caused the company to suffer \u201csignificant reputational, operational, and financial harm.\u201d<\/p>\n News of the lawsuit comes weeks after TechCrunch reported that Marquis was planning to seek compensation<\/a> from SonicWall. The Plano, Texas-based fintech giant had told its customers that it blamed SonicWall for allowing hackers to steal sensitive information about customer firewall configuration files, including its own.<\/p>\n \u201cSonicWall allowed a threat actor to obtain the keys to bypass that line of defense and walk right into Marquis\u2019s internal network, the very thing that SonicWall\u2019s firewall was supposed to prevent,\u201d reads the complaint.<\/p>\n Firewalls are meant to prevent unauthorized access to a company\u2019s network, but Marquis alleges that the hackers who scrambled its network with ransomware used information stolen from SonicWall about how its customers configure their firewalls, including emergency passcodes (known as scratch codes) that allowed access to Marquis\u2019 internal network.<\/p>\n Marquis, which allows hundreds of banks and credit unions to visualize their customers\u2019 data, said the hackers took \u201cpersonally identifiable information concerning customers of some of Marquis\u2019s financial institution clients\u201d in its cyberattack.<\/p>\n The stolen data includes customer names, dates of birth, postal addresses, and financial information, including bank account, debit, and credit card numbers, as well as customers\u2019 Social Security numbers<\/p>\n A spokesperson for SonicWall did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.<\/p>\n SonicWall first admitted<\/a> a breach of its systems in mid-September, in which it said fewer than 5% of its customer firewall configuration backup files were exfiltrated from its storage servers, hosted on Amazon\u2019s cloud and maintained by SonicWall. The firewall maker in October conceded that in fact every customer<\/a> had their firewall backup files stolen in the breach. <\/p>\n