Bobbi Mlynar reports:
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure for ESB Financial officials who this morning announced that a data backup seven years ago had inadvertently been sent to an unauthorized storage source.
Marketing Vice President Karen Sommers said that the bank had hired a specialist to work on a special program to be used by the bank. The contract workers was using a laptop in conjunction with the project.
“The information that was backed up was co-mingled with a lot of things,” Sommers said. “… We were working on a software problem here in the bank, and protocol was not followed when the person with the laptop left the bank.”
Only checking and money-market account information was backed up to the incorrect outside data-storage company.
A total of 3,097 customers could have been affected by the backup.
The outside computer specialist did not realize what had happened, and knowledge of the problem did not surface for seven years, when someone stumbled onto information and numbers during an Internet search.
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