Not All Is Well At Wells Fargo
Not All Is Well At Wells Fargo
Month Date, 2006: Wells Fargo loses customer data along with computer hardware while in transit. HP staffers hit by loss.
The major US delivery service, Wells Fargo has admitted to losing a computer full of customer data - including personal information - while in transit.
This news comes as one more drop in a fast-rising sea of data loss via theft or straightforward incompetence; though, it should be pointed out that Wells Fargo was quick to point out its case to customers.
This news comes as Mercantile Potomac Bank announced that it had lost 50,000 names, addresses, account details and social security numbers. For once a financial institution cannot blame computer error. The data was stolen from an employee's laptop in a car parked in a carpark owned by the bank itself. Obviously this raises questions regarding why an employee would have 50,000 people's details on a laptop in the first place.
If this wasn't enough of a cautionary tale, Fidelity Investments (yet again a US-based fin-services company) discovered that 196,000 client records had been pinched from, yes, a laptop. This time the computer was in a car parked outside a restaurant in a public street.
With more people taking work home, more laptops being used to replace desktops, and apparently less security being applied to data and hardware, these three stories represent the potential for a growing trend.
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