Now You Can Buy Bank Details On eBay!
The lax levels of security which some financial institutions in the UK currently have in place have culminated in the sale of a £35 PC on eBay which contained the details of over 1 million credit card applicants for Royal Bank of Scotland. While nobody was aware that the details had not been safely removed from the PC it seems as though record archiving group Graphic Data allowed one of its machines to be sold on eBay - with the data still on the hard drive!
Thankfully the machine was acquired by an IT manager who contacted the authorities as soon as he realised the data was highly confidential. However the episode has posed a number of questions not only to the Royal Bank of Scotland but to the financial industry as a whole. How safe are highly sensitive data records?
When you consider that the Nationwide Building Society was fined nearly £1 million when a laptop containing highly confidential customer records was stolen from an employee's home earlier this year, what reaction can the Royal Bank of Scotland expect from the FSA?
At a time when customer confidence in the internet seems to be picking up we have recently seen a number of high profile data protection gaffs. Let us hope these do not affect the consumer's long term trust in the superhighway!
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