Three men have been charged for the 2014 cyber attack on JP Morgan.

US prosecutors have charged three men for an elaborate hacking and fraud operation that included a massive attack on JP Morgan last year.

The hacking attack on the New York banking group, which also affected 7 million small firms, saw the accounts of more than 76 million individuals affected and user contact details compromised. It was one the largest such data breaches at a financial institution and is said to have generated hundreds of millions of dollars of illegal profit.

An American citizen, Joshua Samuel Aaron, and Israelis Gery Shalon and Ziv Orenstein, were charged in a 23-count indictment with alleged crimes targeting a dozen companies. The crimes included computer hacking, securities fraud, identity theft, illegal internet gambling and conspiring to commit money laundering.

“By any measure, the data breaches at these firms were breathtaking in scope and in size” and signal a “brave new world of hacking for profit,” said Preet Bharara, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, at a news conference in Manhattan. He added that the attack was like “securities fraud on cyber steroids” and branded the operation “hacking as a business model”.