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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."
I mean, it's probably more likely that some law got passed in the past few years that's forcing companies to highlight all these incidents of compromised data, but it seems pretty spooky that we just recently hear about all these stories...
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Just gave them a call to close my account and I must say that they (or at least the person I talked to) was well versed on the talking points from the press release.
1) Blame third party
2) Data is not lost, we just don't know where it is
3) There has been no evidence of the data being used
The woman I spoke with was pretty adamant about making these points and really tried to keep me from closing my account.
I am not sure if this sort of revelation usually results in a significant loss of business or not, but it would appear they were well prepared to rebut peoples concerns.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
The data was encrypted. According to Ameritrade (my broker), special hardware is required to read the information, even if the tape was found.
All this information was sent in a letter last week.
As a customer, I feel it was nice for them to keep me in the loop, but I don't feel the least bit threatened.
Pretty much every company I've ever worked for uses some sort of courier service to move backup tapes off site. If something happens with that courier, after every reasonable precaution was taken by Ameritrade (which it certainly appears it has), it's pretty much out of their control.
They said what's happened, and what they think the exposure is. What else would you have them do, not send their backup tapes offsite?