Farmers Insurance has acknowledged a data breach impacting over 1 million policyholders due to a cyberattack from a third party. This event, associated with recent hacks related to Salesforce, involved a vishing scam that permitted unauthorized access to confidential records.

The company was alerted about the breach on May 30 when a vendor reported unusual activity. Farmers brought in outside data-security specialists to conduct an investigation and began reaching out to impacted customers on Aug. 22.

The compromised information includes names, addresses, birth dates, driver’s license numbers, and in some instances, the last four digits of Social Security numbers. Reports suggest approximately 1,111,386 individuals were affected across 10 states: California, Washington D.C., Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, and Rhode Island.

A spokesperson for Farmers Insurance remarked:

“At Farmers, safeguarding our customers’ information is our utmost priority. We recently discovered that an unauthorized third party temporarily accessed a vendor’s system that held some Farmers’ customer data. The incident involved only a limited amount of information from select customers.

An investigation — carried out with both internal and external security professionals — uncovered no signs that the disclosed data has been misused, nor any indication that Farmers’ own systems were compromised. We are directly contacting affected individuals and providing support resources, which include free credit monitoring.”

Farmers Insurance is a subsidiary of the Zurich Insurance Group, which reported $2.2 billion in profits in the previous year. Zurich, one of the largest insurers worldwide, reported $7.8 billion in operating profit for 2024. According to Bleeping Computer, the compromised data was part of a widespread Salesforce data theft initiative affecting numerous organizations this year, revealing sensitive information across various sectors.