Tesco Bank Incident

The personal and financial details of dozens of Tesco Bank customers have been leaked resulting in possible fraud. The cause of the incident has been attributed to the action of staff who sent the unprotected personal data in the post.

The data was being sent over post from Manchester to Glasgow and was lost somewhere between that. Customers of the bank were already fuming over a dispute with Tesco Bank as they were levied charges for controversial payment protection insurance on Tesco credit cards.

From their side, Tesco is blaming a ’service provider’ for the data loss. Also the employee who is responsible for sending the details is a a staff member from taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) an was working as a contractor for Tesco Bank. The Royal Bank of Scotland has taken full responsibility of the incident but has refused to divulge further details and answer questions about the incident.

The loss was discovered by Tesco Bank last month. On incident discovery, Tesco bank started contacting customers about the problem in July and as a gesture for the loss offered two years of free insurance against potential losses arising from the breach.

Apparently, the impact of the incident is small due to less customers but having said that the incident opens the slack procedures adopted by financial service companies to secure confidential customer information.

A spokesman of Tesco Bank said: ‘Tesco Bank and the service provider have robust rules and procedures for handling customer information. ‘There is no record of the correspondence being sent by courier or recorded delivery. That leaves the possibility that it was sent by standard mail, contrary to ours and our suppliers data handling procedures. ‘Therefore, we have taken the precaution to inform our customers and take steps to safeguard their accounts.

Verizon Data Breach Report

In another news, Verizon has published a thorough report detailing out the number of data breach incidents resulting in theft of electronic records. As an encouraging statistic, it is nice to see the total number of compromised data breaches going down to 143 in (2009) compared with 285 (in 2008).

The report which is slightly contrasting to the study conducted by Ponemon institute, attributes the dip to law enforcement success, including the arrest of Alberto Gonzales in 2008.

Some statistics from Verizon’s report:

1. 96% of breaches could have been avoided through simple or intermediate controls.
2. 141 breaches from 2009 investigated by U.S. Secret Service (84) or Verizon (57) involved a patchable vulnerability
3. More than half of the breaches were discovered by outsiders after a long period of time (60% of breach incidents).
4. The organized criminal groups were behind 85% of the data stolen in 2009

The full report can be downloaded from Verizon Business Web site.

The biggest gap indicated by Verizon’s report is inadequate expenditure on security processes, systems and software. While organizations have started investing on data security software and laptop encryption software, there is still a long way to go in terms of adoption among most enterprises.

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If you use a data security software a theft would simply be reduced to an insurance matter and cost of the hardware plus time to rebuild the laptop. That is certainly a small price to pay compared to what can happen if you lose confidential or sensitive data. Alertsec Xpress offers a very good and easy-to-use laptop security service that includes more than the traditional software licensing model. Feel free to subscribe for your personal 30-day free trial.