Slashdot Mirror
Computer With UK Bank Customer Data Sold On eBay
Walpurgiss tips a BBC News story about a man in Oxford who paid $140 for a computer on eBay, and was shocked to find on it bank records of several million customers of the Royal Bank of Scotland, its subsidiary Natwest, and one other bank. "Mr. Chapman said anyone with a basic knowledge of computer software would have been able to find the data fairly simply. 'The information was in back-up CDs and in ISO files so it would have been possibly quite easy to find...,' he said."
You could have wiped the data and kept things quiet. You could have walked into a local branch and asked to speak to the manager, carrying the drive.
But no. You chose to help ruin the second hand market for machines by going public. It's bad enough that we have WEEE regulations meaning now "give them to hobbyists" is more convoluted, and crappier solder meaning equipment won't last the 20 years it used to anyway (yes, that's right, people under 30, SOME equipment does actually remain useful for that long).
You know what'll happen now? They'll just implement the more secure practices of UBS etc and crush whole machines, when in fact all they would have to do is destroy the drives at worst.
I've had machines ranging from Pfizer and Racal (military electronics) land in my hands with unwiped drives with confidential data, though not through public channels, and I was trusted to "remove everything on the drive" - god knows why the admins didn't wipe the drives on decommission, but there you go. In the Pfizer case, it was as simple as management telling employees "we're getting rid of everything *there* - feel free to take it home", and then an employee totally unrelated to IT passing to me.
But I wasn't enough of a fuck to go to the media about the huge mistake.