News

posted on 26 August 2008 14:19

American Express, NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland customer details, including 1 million signatures, were found on a PC bought for £77 on Ebay.

The PC was used in an archive centre run by Graphic Data in Shoeburyness, Essex, UK. That centre stores offsite data for financial institutions that can't be arsed to look after it properly themselves. Graphic Data is owned by Mail Source which is owned by Swiss Post. The bloody gnomes have exposed a million plus bank and debit card customers to identity theft.

Just take a moment and stop spluttering with range at the galactic carelessness of these crap organisations and ask yourself how many businesses have your credit card details, name and address on their files? Probably its twenty plus.

How securely is that information held? How often is the security of that data audited? The answers are (1) not very, and (2) probably never. Why haven't the financial services and hotel and travel and other industries dealing with consumers by credit cards put into place a code of practise with fangs - not teeth, I want blood here - meaning instant dismissal and a level of fines to make shareholders blanch to ensure that this information is held in the IT equivalent of Fort bloody Knox?

As for Graphic Data an employee made an honest mistake. Huh? He takes a PC from a secure area which holds the most sensitive personal financial details imaginable and sells it on Ebay? What kind of idiotic business is this? If it looked after cash in the same way it would be bankrupt in minutes. Where were the procedures and processes you think would be necessary?

The Mail Source CEO is Markus J Becker. It would seem appropriate for him to be sacked. Now. That would show people that the storage of personal financial data is taken seriously.

He won't be though. You can imagine the statement: "... extremely regrettable .. taking every possible step... learn the lessons ... isolate incident .... It is my responsibility to ensure that Mail Source becomes a world-class organisation." Yeah, right.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}