The going rate for one million records containing sensitive data is apparently £35 GBP. That is what Andrew Chapman paid for used IT equipment on eBay. According to The Daily Mail, the information belonged to the Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and American Express. Each has promised to launch investigations into the discovery.
One million records containing sensitive information are discovered after auction on eBay. (IMG:Ebay)
As reported by The Daily Mail, the secondhand equipment was sold off by an employee of Graphic Data, an archive firm in Shoeburyness, Essex. A spokeswoman for the company said that it was aware of who sold the equipment and that, "we believe it was an honest mistake and it was not intentional to sell it without the server being cleared."
The spokeswoman added that Graphic Data wants "to stress that this is an isolated incident and we are investigating how the server was removed and sold. This is a very unfortunate incident and we are taking measures to ensure it will never happen again."
The likely reason is that the equipment was taken off the books and sold to the employee, or perhaps simply given to them, before they then turned around and sold it online. The problem is that this is an employee of a data storage company, so you have to wonder how it missed that day in class when you learn to destroy hard drives and never sell them with data still readable.
The discovered data included account numbers, signatures, names, phone numbers and other information. The good news is that none of this information ended up in the hands of a third party. Instead, it landed in the hands of Andrew Chapman, who, after he made his discovery, returned the hardware to Graphic Data.
The Daily Mail is reporting that The Information Commissioner's Office is looking into violations of the Data Protection Act. American Express, as well as NatWest and the Royal Bank of Scotland are each looking at what data was exposed as a result of the sale, and say they will contact customers after they have finished looking at all the data.
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