On my way back from a recent business meeting in London my eye was drawn to a newspaper article stating that the Financial Services Authority Board had imposed its greatest fine ever on the bank for losing critical customer information.
The regulatory body said that the fine was imposed for the banks “failure to have the most basic systems and controls in place to protect its customers’ names, addresses. Dates of birth and national insurance numbers from being lost or stolen”.
The article cited that this was “an era of growing identity theft and high-profile personal data losses”, it seems the old adage “it will never happen to me” is still alarmingly in vogue!
Margaret Coles, the regulatory authority’s director of enforcement said “firms must ensure that their data security systems and controls and constantly reviewed and updated to tackle this growing threat”.
It was also noted that fines can be expected to increase, and I am sure we can expect this attitude to be reflected in Ireland as well as the UK.
Incredibly the data loss was due to data being held on an unencrypted disk about members of a pension fund in 2007!
Under the Data Protection Acts of 1988 and 2003 any company storing personal data (which includes most companies) are obliged to take appropriate measures to protect that data.
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