This story is brilliant! Not only do banks and goverment manage to unbelievably leave laptops containing confidential information lying around on public transport, or can be overheard discussing secret plans but have now been found for literally giving them away!!
RBS, Natwest and American Express all had data stored on a hard-drive that was sold with a computer on ebay. Fortunatly and as unpredictably as ever, the computer was sold to an IT manager who paid a cool but heavily disputed £77 or is it £35? for the device. So the data managed to fall into the lap of someone who knew what he was doing and who also knew who to contact (The Daily Mail).
Along with the announcement of this the banks involved wonderfully try to remove themselves from the incident as much as possible by saying
“The IT equipment that appeared on eBay was neither planned nor instructed by the company to be disposed,”
I like that, like some how, in an unexplained manner, somebody walked out, not with a laptop, which would have made this whole incident slightly less rediculous, but with a whole computer! Only to then decide to come to the conclusion to sell it on ebay! There could only be three possible senarios for this situation to come about.
1) Man walks out of bank with computer, thinks he can get some money for this, and puts it straight on ebay (Stupidity Level 99%) (Slightly reduced due to seller may have not known what actually was on the Hard-Drive, however he did take it from a bank!)
2) Man walks out of bank with computer, uses it for a few months, then decides to sell on ebay (Stupidity Level 100%) – I wonder if it was purchased off ebay with all this data and a copy of The Sims 2 installed?!
3) Man walks out of bank with computer, forgets about computer, later finds computer and decides to sell on ebay, failing to remember it was stolen from a bank! Now, i don’t know about you but I sure would remember if I ever walked out of a business building with computer that belonged to that business under my arms!
Either way this does not make sense, especially in the time we live in where protection of data is becoming more and more written and understood by the public media. One day all these businesses will respond, one day something just way to important will be stolen or accidentally left around. It just shows that even in the times we live in now, people still don’t think about computer security, how can it be neglected, when so many people are out there after any data they can get! I also believe stories like this still get quickly glanced at by many people, just like disasters in foriegn countries, it is sometimes hard to really relate when you can’t see it. Just like this, it all could seem so removed and I think that’s how security breeches like these can easily appear to the public.
I would like to turn our attention to the other business which is mentioned in this story, Ebay. Any story like this and ebay makes extra business from it’s name. I bet anybody selling a computer on ebay at the moment must have noticed a hike in interest from people wanting to purchase it, just to see what is on those hard-drives, hoping to strike it lucky. These sort of stories are simply free advertising for them! I find that amusing. Here’s to the many more that are bound to come.
Forg
