Bank Of America Loses 1.2 Million Customer Records

Christopher Reimer writes "C|Net is reporting that Bank of America lost 1.2 million customer records when some backup tapes went missing while being shipped to a backup center. The lost records mainly effect U.S. government employees involved in the SmartPay program. From the article: 'The acknowledgment comes as several other cases of businesses losing consumer information have come to light.'"

Comments

Well..

[kunwon1]

As a US Government employee (US Air Force to be precise) I can tell you that Bank of America is regarded by most of us (us = gov't employees) as a faceless entity that cares nothing for customer service. I doubt this will come as much of a surprise to those of us who have been required by our occupation to associate with them for some time. Maybe now the powers that be will get their collective head out and pick a new bank.

Re:Well..

[heybo]

You are right BoA IS a faceless entity that cares nothing about their customers and only their profits. I live in Atlanta (their corp offices are here) I have been screwed out of my own money my them, and have heard 1,000s of stories that are the same. This has been happening with this bank for over 20 years that I know of. Still people continue to use them.

I will not use them in any form. I will drive 10 miles out of the way to NOT use even their ATM machines. (No they ain't even getting my $1.50 for a transaction.

One more thing...

[kunwon1]

GSA Smartpay is a program through which gov't employees are issued what is essentially a company credit card, but the US Gov't is the company. They're used for official purchases, for gas cards for government owned vehicles, etcetera.

The following website explains it in governmentese:
http://www.gsa.gov/Portal/gsa/ep/channelView.do?pa geTypeId=8199&channelPage=%2Fep%2Fchannel%2FgsaOve rview.jsp&channelId=-13497

Big Brother's Little Helper?

[handy_vandal]

ChoicePoint Inc.'s top two executives made a combined $16.6 million in profit from selling company shares in the months after the data warehouser learned that people's personal information may have been compromised and before the breach was made public, regulatory filings show. ... ChoicePoint says the stock trading was pre-arranged under a plan approved by the company's board.

One might easily assume that the executives are profiteering swine, and that the company's board members are colluding at the trough.

Furthermore, ChoicePoint has a ... questionable history:

Consider what happened in Florida leading up to the 2000 presidential election. In 1998, the state hired a company called Database Technologies to scrub its voter rolls of ineligible voters. The scrub list was mandated by Florida legislators after a voting fraud investigation revealed dead people had cast ballots in the 1997 Miami mayoral election.

DBT combed through Florida's rolls and handed over the "ineligible" list to elections officials in May 2000 -- within days of the company's merger with ChoicePoint.

The problem was that DBT'S list purged the voter rolls not just of felons, who are disqualified from voting in Florida, but of eligible voters whose names resembled those of the felons.

While Florida and DBT failed to check a number of criteria that could have distinguished the actual felons from the non-felons, one criterion that DBT did bother cross-referencing was race. BBC reporter Greg Palast and a handful of US journalists reported that the majority of the felons on the list were black, so thousands of legitimate black voters with the same names as black felons were struck from the rolls. Because Florida blacks vote heavily Democratic, a disproportionate number of votes for Al Gore were thrown out.

According to analyses by news organizations, somewhere between 8,000 and 22,000 qualified votes went uncounted. Whatever the number, it towers over 537 -- the margin by which George W. Bush won Florida, and therefore the national election.

The most jarring part, according to Palast, who broke the story, was that DBT knew the list was flawed -- because a Florida official told DBT, in a 1999 e-mail, "Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren't matches and let the county supervisors make a final determination." Palast says the fact that the company would even hand over known mistakes shows that it doesn't always do its best -- contrary to its corporate mantra -- to protect the government against itself.

Source

With companies like that, who needs Big Brother? -kgj

Re:Well...

[bombadillo]

You are absolutely correct about law suits needing to be filed. My wife and I work for two large corporations. I am talking name brands that everyone knows. I was talking to her about a project that I was working on and how the users info is sorted in the Database by credit card number. There are a few things wrong with this. From a non-security stand point people have more than one credit card. So you would have plenty of duplicates. From a security standpoint there were loads of problems. Such as the data would be FTP'd from the mainframes to the unix midrange servers. So all of that data would be distributed about the enterprise. Makes absoutetley no sense. Especially since there was no reason for the application I was working on to know a credit card number. The only data needed was name and products bought. When talking with my wife about how bad it was she told me that it was the same way in her company. I can only think that these companies built there systems a long time ago and no one has taken on the ambitious project of updating their procedures. From a career standpoint I can't blame them. There is not a big demand to secure these systems better. It would be a huge effort with little reward. If things didn't work your career would be over.

If law suits start being filed there will be a sudden demand to get these systems more secure. It's always annoyed me that financial companies have charged us for their "credit protection" services. I have always felt that if my ID was stolen it would most likely be the fault of a financial institution and not me.