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NetworkGuy
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Post subject: Man pays £35 on for used NAS with bank info on 1 mil people
 Posted: Aug 28, 2008 - 03:08 PM CST
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Site Admin
Joined: Apr 18, 2005
Posts: 59
  
Status: Offline
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Wow- this is scary but interesting tidbit of news. It's simply terrible security precautions taken by the previous owner of the NAS.
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When Andrew Chapman, an IT manager in the UK, bought a used Snap! box on eBay for £35, he got a lot more than he expected. Unbeknown to Chapman, the machine contained personal bank account and credit card information on over one million American Express, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and NatWest customers. Chapman told TechRepublic sister site ZDNet UK on Tuesday “that the server, a network attached storage (NAS) box, contained unencrypted backups of CDs.” Graphic Data, a data-archiving firm, had used the machine to store information for RBS, of which NatWest is a subsidiary. Customer information included names, addresses, bank account numbers, telephone numbers and customer signatures.
According to ZDNet UK:
“The IT equipment that appeared on eBay was not planned to be disposed [of] by the company and investigations are still ongoing to find out how this equipment was removed from one of Graphic Data’s secure locations,” the company said in the statement. “We take customer privacy and data security very seriously. This incident is extremely regrettable and we’re taking every possible step to retrieve the data and ensure this is an isolated incident.”
According to the Daily Mail, “a spokesman for Mail Source, which owns Graphic Data, put the situation down to an ‘honest mistake’.” We all make mistakes and even the best IT departments mess up now and again. But, Graphic Data’s allowing, either through act or omission, an employee to sell hard drives that held, or even once held, sensitive data is shameful. Shameful not just because the data was lost, but because this failure was easily preventable. Graphic Data lost control of the data because either adequate physical security policies weren’t in place, weren’t followed, or weren’t enforced.
Full story and IT security tips:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/itdojo/?p=167 |
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