Heather Smith reports:
Two Credit Mutuel-CIC units were inspected by France’s data protection authority following a data system failure reported on Dec. 28 by weekly newspaper Canard Enchaine, the Paris-based watchdog said today.
The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertes searched an information-technology unit in Strasbourg, France, and a newspaper belonging to the bank in the French town of Woippy, CNIL said on its website.
Read more on Bloomberg.
From the few articles that I’ve read in translation, it seems that journalists working for the bank-owned newspaper were able to access the bank’s customers accounts. Here’s a Google translation of one of the news articles:
Bank statements, insurance contracts or purchase orders and sales of gold. Some data bank which had access to all the group Ebra French journalists held by Crédit Mutuel-CIC, for several months, according to “The Chained Duck” on Wednesday.Thousands of highly confidential data available in a few clicks thanks to the internal software common to all editors of the group through special windows, appeared in 2011.
Entitled “CIC banks”, “CIC International” or even “Cofidis France,” these windows allowed the authors of the Republican Lorrain , of East Republican or Latest News from Alsace to update the secrecy of thousands of customers the bank. And the accounts, the satirical newspaper mentions those of Baudouin Prot, and Frédéric Oudéa, respective owners of BNP Paribas and Societe Generale.