The share price of Walter Investment Management Corp. tumbled just over 7 percent in trading midweek on no news...

Members of the Ziroli family, which owned the lender/servicer, could not be reached for comment.

Mortgage lenders face a growing risk from cyberattacks from an increasingly sophisticated hacker universe, as well as more regulatory scrutiny over the issue, according to experts at this week’s annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “There is an arms bazaar of malware for sale in the market, with about 300 new programs – that we know about – being released every day,” said Roger Cressey, a partner at Liberty Group Ventures. The market has been turned into a business, with malware sellers forging service level agreements with their customers through which the buyer doesn’t have to pay if the product doesn’t result in a successful intrusion, he said. Because many hackers are more interested in stealing the target’s client information than crashing its system, the mortgage industry – which sits on mountains of personally identifiable information – is...

Conventional conforming loans accounted for 60.3 percent of the 2014 mortgage market, according to an Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of 2014 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Wells Fargo was the top HMDA lender last year with a 7.9 percent share of the market. HMDA originations include only retail and table-funded broker production and do not include correspondent acquisitions. Wells was the top conventional-conforming lender and the biggest jumbo producer. Quicken Loans was...[Includes one data table]

CFPB Director Richard Cordray had his turn next: “Prophets of doom have warned of delays in closings and the need for consumers to buy longer rate locks because of their failure, or perhaps refusal, tounderstand the requirements of the three-day waiting period,” he said.

The theme Cressey and other experts repeatedly drove home is that the industry can never get ahead of the threat.

Michael Fratantoni, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said the GSEs’ back-end risk-sharing deals do not represent the type of reform most industry participants would like to see.

The fear for MI firms, and the analysts who cover them, is that another cut in the MIP would eat into policies that might be written by the private mortgage insurance sector.

Some observers believe the CFPB is questioning whether certain LOS vendors are qualified to serve the industry, fearing a potential crackdown on such companies.

Investors that buy homes accounted for 15.2 percent of purchasers in September, based on a three-month moving average.