British Banking Details up for Sale Again

[Papewaio]

Customers' bank details sold on eBay

A British data processing firm has launched an urgent review after a staff member sold a computer on eBay containing personal details of a million bank customers, a spokeswoman said.

The computer was bought on the online auction site for £35 ($75) by Andrew Chapman, an IT manager from Oxford, in central England, who found the information on the computer's hard drive.

Ok, and now for the most flimsy excuse I have seen yet:

A spokeswoman for Mail Source said the employee who sold the computer had made an "honest mistake" but insisted it had been an "isolated incident".

She said: "The computer was removed from our secure storage facility in Essex and sold on eBay.

"We know which employee took the server and sold it, but we believe it was an honest mistake and it was not intentional to sell it without the server being cleared.

It might be an honest mistake for the employee. But it does not take off any pressure from the business. The business should have processes, audits and means in place to protect all data.

Even with non-sensitive business data when it is decommissioned here we swipe the hard drives with a degaussing wand and then put a dent into the physical hard drive so the platters are squashed.

Also how can they say it was an isolated incident... they only know about this because the guy who found it came forth. The other 'two hundred' servers might have been sold to the Russian hackers already.

[PBI]

The thing that surprised me about the story was that the computer was sold on ebay for £35. Is it just not a very good computer, or am I right in thinking that is very cheap?

Regarding the data protection issue, one would hope that the company in question will lose all its customers and go out of business in short order, having essentially demonstrated that they are incapable of doing their jobs.

[Kralizec]

"secure storage facility"....right

[Louis VI the Fat]

Good grief! Again!?

There are more scandals of private information leaking from British banks and governments than there are of plutonium leaking out of our nuclear plants.

[KukriKhan]

It had belonged to data processing company Mail Source which is part of Graphic Data, a company that holds financial information for banks and other organisations.

Maybe this is the weak link: "...holds financial information for..."? Laptops stolen from Naval officers with too much personal info on them is one thing; this is quite another, I think. Third-party outsourcing of data archives, though fiscally 'efficient' when it works well, can obviously pose huge risks to the first party (and their clients) when things go wrong. Makes a good case for in-house data storage by accountable, trained IT people.

[macsen rufus]

Makes a good case for in-house data storage by accountable, trained IT people.

It makes an even better case for demanding your wages in cash, and keeping your assets under the mattress

It seems that personal data, like The Truth, will always out...