Charter Oak is grateful to its members

DCharter Oak will always be forthright with its members. We are truthful, trustworthy and always mindful of their needs and concerns.

uring the recent online banking disruption at Charter Oak, we witnessed extraordinary loyalty and support from our members. We can’t thank you enough. We are also extremely honored and appreciative that dedicated members of the community, including media partners, like Full Power Radio, Hall Communications, and WINY, stood by us and reported our information accurately.

We would like to address one misconception and one error in The Day’s recent editorial. The Day’s editorial board wrote that “a spoofing email was sent to some members” and also wrote: “How does a hacker get access to email addresses ... in the first place?” As we noted numerous times in our radio interviews, emails to members, social media, and as The Day stated in its own editorial, no member funds or data of any kind (including member email addresses) were accessed or obtained by anyone. Spoofing emails were not sent to Charter Oak members.

Secondly, we are extremely proud of our heritage and history. We were formed in 1939 as the Groton Shipbuilders Federal Credit Union. We are proud to have served the employees, families, and retirees of Electric Boat for the last 84 years. We still have thousands of members who are or have been affiliated with Electric Boat, where our story began in their shipyard when 10 brave men pooled $25 each to start our credit union. We are disappointed that our local news outlet is unaware of our origin.

The Day’s editorial also asked, “What were hackers looking for — What was the end game?” We’ve stated numerous times the perpetrators were looking for our members’ usernames and passwords and attempted to get them by setting up a fake Charter Oak website. We have had zero reports of any fraud since the incident. We have been back online for over a week now. We have forced a password change and have required multifactor authentication upon subsequent logins. We believe we have foiled the efforts of the bad actors who were trying to use our members’ login credentials.

Charter Oak will always be forthright with its members. We are truthful, trustworthy and always mindful of their needs and concerns. We sent out twice daily updates to members, used social media to keep members aware of developments, and responded to a flood of questions. We also held a Microsoft Teams meeting where I answered questions from members.

We thank our valued members, amazing employees, and trusted community partners who have stood by us during this challenging event. We will continue to make sure the public is aware of the progress of our postmortem review of this incident. This may take some time, as we need to be thorough and comprehensive.