Ameritrade Customer Data Lost

Rollie Hawk writes "Continuing the recent trend of customer data blunders in the news, Ameritrade has announced the loss of the personal data of up to 200,000 customers. The suspected cause is a routing error, but not the network kind. The online discount broker admitted that a backup tape of customer account data from 2000 to 2003 has been misplaced. They claim the cause is an error on the part of a shipping company. The tape was identified as missing in February, soon after being shipped. According to spokeswoman Donna Kush, nothing suspicious has been reported. Further blaming the shipping company, she explained that "this was not an Ameritrade Systems issue or a compromise of our technology. This was related to a third party vendor." It's doubtful that current and former customers with exploited information will care how this occurred. She further claimed that Ameritrade "has every reason to believe" that the tape has either been destroyed or is being held by the shipper. There's no word yet on how they arrived at this conclusion."

Comments

Luckily..

[ShaniaTwain]

Luckily it was insured against loss and Ameritrade will be recieving a check for $100 dollars!

oh HooRay!

In Other News

[ackthpt]

HOLLAND, MI (OOP) OSTG has revealed that member data for Slashdot.org, an online technical news site, has been compromised. "At first we thought it was only a network error, until we noticed trends in trolling and moderation making little sense," said Rob Malda, who goes by the nickname of CmdrTaco and was one of the sites founders. "Posts which were clearly uninformative, insightful or interesting were receiving high marks, while better pieces were completely ignored." Further, Malda indicated the loss may have been as high as 100,000 ids and passwords. Which in the wrong hands could tip the opinions of nerds and geeks the world over. In early hours of trading the NASDAQ plummeted 11% on the news and downtown Holland, Michigan was in flames as a mob of panicking and angry posters went on a rampage, before sating itself on chocolate covered espresso beans at the Rocky Peanut Company and pausing to "ooh and ahh" at shiny things in the local Radio Shack window or gaze longingly at the poster for the upcoming Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith outside the local theater. Said Holland mayor, Albert H. McGeehan, "Well, isn't this a fine kettle of tulips!" At press time OSTG had not returned any calls on the matter.

As an Ameritrade customer I'd be worried...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully, all my tech stocks have tanked and there are no more assets to attack. As a matter of fact, I'm more likely to get sued by identity theives for ruining their reputations and credit ratings.

Compressed Data Secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite:

"the missing back-up tape contained compressed data that would require very advanced computer systems to access."

http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/19/technology/ameri tr ade/

Note she did not say encrypted. Modern tape software is often intelligent enough to recognize not only its own compression algorithms, but also formats and algorithms used by other vendors. Maybe Ameritrade thinks they are one of the only companies in the world utilizing LTO, or maybe LTO-2?

News at 11, [insert company name here] loses data

[lxdbxr]

At this point, I feel it would be useful to have a list of major companies which have not lost hundreds of thousands of customer records.

We could then refuse to do business with those companies on the grounds that they were obviously lying.

FOR SALE

[jchawk]

One tape backup tape. Appears to be functional, bought from local shipping company at auction. :-P

Re:Ameritrade Customer Service

[garcia]

2) Data is not lost, we just don't know where it is

And that's when you tell them that just because it's 4/20 does not mean they can be high at work.

Re:actually....

[The Slashdolt]

Dear Sir,

Recently, we were sending all of the money in your account to another branch and, well, it got lost on the way. Sorry, shit happens.

Sincerely,
Your Bank

Re:Data loss... or ... data collection?

[tomhudson]

So it's okay for me to bid $10 for the copy of it that's being sold on eBay?

Re:MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. ;)

Re:Question

[Politburo]

According to Ameritrade (my broker), special hardware is required to read the information

That's correct. The tape is unreadable with human eyes.

Easy to restore

[Dun Malg]

Even if they don't have backups it should be easy to get most of the info. Just send an email to their customers:

Dear valued Ameritrade customer:
Due to computers errors, we may have lost some of your informations. Please go to the following web site and verify your informations. Please do so as soon as possible or your account may be suspended. Thank you.

http:/256.123.321.201/Ameritrade.html

Re:Question

[Greyfox]

They said it was "compressed" and would require "an advanced system" to access the data. I assume they mean it'd require a system with gunzip and a tape drive. Fortunately there aren't any of those out there except in corporate IT departments.