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Hundreds of Bank Account Details Left In London Pub
twoheadedboy writes "Another day, yet another data security failure. Two companies have been found in breach of the Data Protection Act after tens of thousands of tenants' details were left at a London pub, alongside 800 records with bank account details. A contractor who had stored data from two different companies on an unencrypted USB drive was responsible. We've all lost things on a night out, but rarely is it other people's banking information. The two firms involved have been told to get a grip on their security procedures, but they escaped a fine from the ICO."
Companies are legal entities that can get away with far too much!
The police can usually be quite creative when it comes to punishing people when they do something stupid on a night out. There are vague concepts like 'public disorder' or 'disturbing the peace' which allow them to lock up someone for at least a night. Can't they apply that to a company that gets drunk? Close it down for 12 hours until it's sober again?
Why didnt they get a fine? The whole point of these acts is to stop this sort of thing happening so what is the exception? Lets see -
"The device contained details of over 20,000 tenants of Lewisham Homes and 6,200 from Wandle Housing Association. Almost 800 of the records belonging to Lewisham Homes also contained tenants’ bank account details."
So let 800 records that include customer bank accounts into the wild and no fine? But if I park my car on the street for an hour too long I get one. mmmm
the BBC article has some more depth (and the site is _much_ faster...). the most interesting sentence is "The memory stick was handed into the police on the weekend of the 5th March and safely retrieved." (emphasis added)
why took it 5 months to disclose the data breach?
From the article: "The two housing companies have agreed to ensure all portable devices are encrypted. Contractors, as well as other staff, will also have their personal data handling monitored."
All they had to do was say they'd be more careful next time, and that was good enough? I almost feel safer hiding my money in a box under my bed at this point.
...the ICO acts on just 1.4% of data breaches and only fines 0.15% of offenders.
http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2011/04/22/ico-penalises-less-than-1-of-security-breaches/
Thought thinks itself.
Reminds me of the other story of the memory device left in a pub.
Clearly, pubs are dangerous places. Let's close them all down.
That was meant ironically, for all of you tards on /. who see a troll under every bridge.
Lost your memory in a pub? I thought that was why one went there.
How in this day and age are companies still doing this? Are PHBs still demanding the company put everything in a single spreadsheet with no password?
Do they just not know of Vista's BitLocker or Mac's FileVault?
The drive should have been encrypted, but can't really blame the guy for being human. We've all told ourselves over and over again not to forget we just put a pizza in the oven and then 20 minutes later start to smell burning.
We've all lost things on a night out
$ mv virginity /mnt/usb/
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I can't think of any other country with as many stories of the form "restricted-access data from XXX was left in a pub by a contractor/employee with company/agency YYY".
I know its not exactly a USB stick with bank details, but other nationalities do quite famously leave things in bars that they probably shouldn't.
Maybe it's just that the British press covers this expecially aggressively,
Ding!
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Lose a prototype iPhone?
Men come busting in to search the apartment of the guy who buys it.
Lose a USB drive with 800 banking records?
A stern talking-to, but no fine.
That would actually be the most secure .exe file ever created. No one is ever going to run it.
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
Left in Pub does not mean left in Pub by Drunken contractor - probably went in for food at lunchtime, and left it behind, just like others have left them on trains, taxi's etc when not drunk ....Pubs in the UK are very often not just Bars, they are nearer Restaurants with a Bar ...
There is a drinking culture in the UK, the problem is that the culture is to drink, without food, in order to get drunk, other countries drink as much, but with food (which lessens the effect), and consider being drunk to be ill mannered ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
I was wondering were I left those. If you just pass them along I would appreciate it. Please send to totallystoked@goingtodosomethingeviltoday.com
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
One was the secret property of our corporate gadget-overlords, the other mere bank-account-info of faceless people. To hell with those!
Exactly. "Pub" is short for "public house" which explains why they feel like someone's livingroom. That's the whole idea, and part of the culture: rather than sitting in your home alone during the evening, you can pop down to the pub and hang out with your friends in essentially the same atmosphere. Local pubs are one of the things that make travelling through the English countryside such a joy! I used to fly through London a fair bit and often would schedule a long stop-over so that I could pop in to town on one of the express trains and have lunch at a proper pub.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
What the hell was a CONTRACTOR doing wandering around with unencrypted BANKING information from TWO DIFFERENT companies?
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Our Mission Statement:
- encryption is obsolete and unnecessary
- carry all client data in easily deposited usb drives for convenience
- go for a pint in the pub daily
Britain doesn't have a drinking problem, at least not to the extent that our media would have you believe. It's been hyped out of proportion on the back of badly designed government statistics, which reveal that large numbers of people regularly binge drink. At least, they do if you define "binge drink" as "drink more than the daily recommended alcohol allowance in a day", where the daily recommended alcohol allowance is 3 units for women or 4 for men (i.e. 2 pints of any reasonably strong lager is "binge drinking" by this definition), an allowance which has been described by the committee that originally set it as essentially a guess with no scientific validity, and probably too low. And even the basic principle of whether a daily allowance rather than a weekly one is a good idea is questionable, because to set a daily allowance you have to consider its effects on people who drink every day, but most people only actually drink once or twice a week.
...when you have employees like them?
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Who the hell brings tens of thousands of case details with them on a USB stick when they go to the pub? Taking a bit of work home over the weekend? Surely you would just access it on the employers VPN in that case?
The only plausible reason I can think of is that the person meant to give or sell it to someone who wasn't allowed to access it.
"We do like our binge drinking" -- Maurice Moss
It's actually defined as more than twice the daily limit, but the rest of your point still stands.
A country one. Every generation goes through it.
I personally don't understand the appeal, but I'm deaf enough that pubs are horrendous conversation blackspots for me and I don't buy the "it's fun to get drunk" angle.
Then again, I bought a litre of vodka an hour ago.. :)
The UK does appear to drink differently to most other European nations. I personally put it down to the puritans and their fucked up approach to life - by demonising alcohol they influenced the country into a lifestyle that doesn't introduce children to alcohol in a gentle, progressive and controlled way. Instead of kids having a glass of wine with their dinner at the age of ten, they get to see their parents stagger in pissed out of their faces, told they aren't allowed any at all and so learn about alcohol on cheap cider in the company of their friends who are equally incapable of coping with it.
It's a long and noble tradition, or something :)
Is to leave all secret documents all over the place, so eventually people get tired of reading all the stuff and leave it alone.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating