Bank of New York Mellon customers were recently informed that their personal information was lost and might potentially be in the hands of cyber thieves.

One of several boxes of data backup tapes that were being taken to an off-site storage facility was lost on Feb. 27, and while the bank has no reason to believe the information will be accessed or misused, that possibility wasn't ruled out.

Bank representatives said yesterday in a prepared statement that they were not aware of any inappropriate access or use of information contained on the tapes. They provided no exact number of how many shareholders were at risk.

"To date, the number of affected shareholders that we've identified is less than 1 percent of the total number of shareholder records in our system," said Ron Sommer, a bank spokesman.

The customers affected are registered owners of securities for which BNY Mellon provides transfer agent services. The missing tapes contained their personal information such as their names, addresses, Social Security numbers, shareholder account information, transaction activity and possibly their bank account numbers.

As a precaution, the bank is offering free credit monitoring for a 12-month period.

BNY Mellon Shareowner Services backs up data on its system on a daily basis, relying on a contractor to transport magnetic tapes used to store the backup data to an off-site storage facility.