From the Information Commissioner’s Office: Two London housing bodies breached the Data Protection Act after details relating to thousands of their tenants were discovered on an unencrypted memory stick left in a pub, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today. The memory stick was handed in to the police and safely retrieved at a later…
Category: Lost or Missing
Commentary: Belmont bank must pay fine for data breach, but was a fine too harsh?
Greg Turner reports: Belmont Savings Bank agreed to pay $7,500 in a settlement of a consumer data breach case with the state attorney general’s office. In May, the bank lost an unencrypted computer tape containing the personal information of more than 13,000 customers. A bank employee left the backup tape on a desk instead of…
[corrected] Missing Plymouth State University backup drive contained Social Security Numbers of 1,059 students
On May 18, Plymouth State University noticed that an external hard drive that they used for backup purposes was missing. One of the files on the drive was a spreadsheet that contained the names and Social Security numbers of 1,059 students enrolled in the teacher education and certification program between 2005 and 2010. As the…
Morgan Stanley investors notified that lost CDs contained their personal and financial data
Christopher Maag reports: Personal information belonging to 34,000 investment clients of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has been lost, and possibly stolen, in a data breach. According to two letters sent to clients, and obtained by Credit.com, the information includes clients’ names, addresses, account and tax identification numbers, the income earned on the investments in 2010,…
Lost in transit: Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing notifies over 3,500 of missing disk
Michael Booth reports: The state Department of Health Care Policy and Financing has lost thousands of applicant names on a computer disk for the second time in a year, triggering a public notice under federal privacy rules. HCPF officials said the names of 3,590 medical-aid applicants were on the lost disk, though the data did…
Scotiabank loses CDs with customer bank accounts, social insurance numbers
Mary Gazze of The Canadian Press reports: Scotiabank says it will use digital locks on data discs after three CDs containing unencrypted information, such as customer social insurance and account numbers, were lost in its internal mail system. The bank said a “small percentage” of customers are affected, but it is warning clients as a…