Shares of Meitav Trade plunged roughly 5% in Tel Aviv trading on September 29 after the brokerage disclosed a weekend cyberattack designed to extract clients' personal and banking details.

According to a regulatory filing with the Israel Securities Authority, the attackers sought to exploit a third-party API vulnerability to extract the confidential details. While the investment firm confirmed that it successfully blocked the breach before hackers could penetrate actual trading accounts or execute unauthorised asset transfers, the incident exposed severe infrastructural friction at Israel's largest retail trading platform. This dip in investor confidence led to the dive in Meitav’s share price.

The decline in investor confidence from this incident could see consumers abandon Meitav for competitors depending on the weight of such security concerns. The value of assets held in bank-advised investment accounts in Israel reached a record ILS 485.6bn ($160.44bn) at the end of 2025, the Israel Securities Authority found, meaning that traditional banks remain a trusted custodian of Israelis' investment portfolios.

Meitav claims to manage ILS 46bn ($15bn) in customer assets across 130,000 accounts, making it Israel's largest investment house. This scale of operations puts intense public scrutiny on the reliability of the company's cybersecurity infrastructure.

The attack was flagged on September 26 when approximately 3,000 clients received unsolicited one-time password (OTP) verification texts.

Meitav launched an immediate audit alongside its external systems provider, uncovering an exposed API interface that allowed unauthorised actors to extract full names, national identification numbers, and bank account details for a limited number of clients.

Hackers attempted to alter the phone numbers associated with the OTP routing, but the system blocked the rerouting commands before they could be completed.

The brokerage noted that no trading systems, passwords, or active financial portfolios were compromised. "The company attaches great importance to protecting the privacy of its customers and safeguarding the information in its possession," Meitav Trade stated in its Tel Aviv Stock Exchange report.

This is not the first technical infrastructure issue faced by Meitav.

In March 2025, Meitav and competitor IBI suffered a multi-hour trading blackout stemming from a communication failure at technology provider FMR, forcing clients to execute trades manually via phone representatives.

These systemic vulnerabilities carry heightened market weight given Meitav's aggressive retail expansion, having onboarded nearly 19,000 new accounts in the first half of 2026 alone and rapidly scaling its vulnerability footprint.