| CATEGORY: NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS SECTOR: BANKS |
Update: HSBC misplaces 370,000 customers' data |
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By John Harrington
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Mon 07 Apr 2008
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LONDON (SHARECAST) - Multi-national banking group HSBC has admitted that it has lost a computer disc containing details of 370,000 of its UK life assurance customers.
The information on the disc includes names, dates of birth and life assurance cover details but not addresses or bank account details, the bank said. The information is password protected but not encrypted.
HSBC said the disc was lost around four weeks ago after being sent from the group’s offices in Southampton via an external courier service to Swiss Reinsurance.
Ordinarily the information would have been encrypted and sent electronically, but on this occasion the electronic transfer system was not working so the information was sent via Royal Mail.
The bank sought to allay customer fears by saying the possibility of anybody being able to commit fraud using the data on the disc “is quite limited."
The Financial Services Authority has been informed of the missing disc but declined to comment on the incident.
Last year the FSA fined Aviva £1.26m for security breaches at its Norwich Union unit. Weaknesses in Aviva’s security processes allowed criminals to use basic customer information to impersonate customers and get access to account details from call centres, the FSA ruled in December of last year.
The criminals managed to alter bank account details of Norwich Union customers and then request the surrender of 74 customer life assurance policies worth £3.3m.
The FSA also fined Nationwide £980,000 last year after a burglar stole a lap-top containing confidential customer details from a Nationwide employee’s home.
The HSBC foul-up is reminiscent of well-publicised security lapses by numerous government agencies in the last five months.
In November of last year the government misplaced two compact discs containing the names, addresses, dates of birth, child benefit numbers, National Insurance numbers and bank or building society account details of 25m child benefit recipients.
This was followed a month later by an incident where 5,500 Post Office card account holders were informed that their card account statements may have been sent to the wrong customers.
In January of this year a lap-top computer containing the personal details of 600,000 potential Armed Forces recruits was stolen from a car parked overnight in Edgbaston, a leafy district of Birmingham.
The incident prompted an enquiry which revealed that more than 200 government department lap-top computers went missing in 2007, including many from HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Defence.
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