ABN Amro loses tape with 2 million names

[IGBT]

Text

..here we go again with lost/missing SS numbers. What the hell is wrong with these guys with their reckless custody problems??




The tape was being moved from a data center run by a subsidiary of LaSalle Bank Corp. in Chicago to an Experian credit bureau facility in Allen, Texas. The tape contained the names, account information, payment histories and social security numbers for residential mortgage customers, according to a letter ABN Amro sent customers.

 

[dardin211]

Slightly off topic of the orginal intent of this thread, but it's kind of funny to me that it was DHL that lost the package. They just lost a package of mine that was coming from Amazon. Wish companies would stop using them, they are so sub-par compared to UPS, FedEX or even USPS....

 

[umbrella39]

I got mail yesterday from ABN stating our info was on the tape. Something to the effect that they would provide free credit monitoring for 30 days blah blah blah. Not too worried.

 

[MiniDoom]

Originally posted by: umbrella39
I got mail yesterday from ABN stating our info was on the tape. Something to the effect that they would provide free credit monitoring for 30 days blah blah blah. Not too worried.

yeah me to.

 

[RightIsWrong]

Update.....tape was found.

 

[halik]

Originally posted by: IGBT
Text

..here we go again with lost/missing SS numbers. What the hell is wrong with these guys with their reckless custody problems??




The tape was being moved from a data center run by a subsidiary of LaSalle Bank Corp. in Chicago to an Experian credit bureau facility in Allen, Texas. The tape contained the names, account information, payment histories and social security numbers for residential mortgage customers, according to a letter ABN Amro sent customers.

The fact that it was lost isn't a problem within itself. Was the content encrypted is the main problem - if someone is shipping mysql dump of 2mil records in plaintext, they oughta be slapped.

With some decent encrytion, the data would be useless for all practical purposes.

 

[racolvin]

Why, in this day of electronic communications, would you effing bother sending a tape for heavens sake? If you do a great deal of data exchange between the companies, just put in a decent speed link between them and upload the friggin file already.

 

[Future Shock]

Originally posted by: racolvin
Why, in this day of electronic communications, would you effing bother sending a tape for heavens sake? If you do a great deal of data exchange between the companies, just put in a decent speed link between them and upload the friggin file already.

Because for sheer high-speed data throughput, NOTHING beats a delivery van loaded with tapes or optical backups. Seriously. I can move tens of petabytes in a delivery van. Try that on even GigaEthernet. Come back next millenium, especially when communications overhead is factored in. And if you want to discuss COSTS...well, we pay quite a substantial sum (VERY substantial) to have a 36Gbit connection to one of our database hosts, and if I was only using it for one update per month to a central agency it would hardly be worth the cost.

This basic calculation is why streaming video basically still sucks for DVD resolution broadcasts, but NetFlix is a runaway success.

Future Shock

 

[XMan]

Originally posted by: dardin211
Slightly off topic of the orginal intent of this thread, but it's kind of funny to me that it was DHL that lost the package. They just lost a package of mine that was coming from Amazon. Wish companies would stop using them, they are so sub-par compared to UPS, FedEX or even USPS....

DHL is the suck.

 

[racolvin]

Originally posted by: Future Shock

Originally posted by: racolvin
Why, in this day of electronic communications, would you effing bother sending a tape for heavens sake? If you do a great deal of data exchange between the companies, just put in a decent speed link between them and upload the friggin file already.

Because for sheer high-speed data throughput, NOTHING beats a delivery van loaded with tapes or optical backups. Seriously. I can move tens of petabytes in a delivery van. Try that on even GigaEthernet. Come back next millenium, especially when communications overhead is factored in. And if you want to discuss COSTS...well, we pay quite a substantial sum (VERY substantial) to have a 36Gbit connection to one of our database hosts, and if I was only using it for one update per month to a central agency it would hardly be worth the cost.

While I understand what you're saying, I have to respectfully disagree - mostly because I don't think we're talking about that much data. What is the quantity of data that was shipped for credit reporting purposes? Name, account, balances, SSN, payment history. So what, 1kB per customer? If they had 50 million customers even, we'd only be talking about roughly 52Gbytes of data to transfer once per month?

Moving petabytes via van is great but those tapes/discs still have to be written at the source, packaged,loaded, transported via truck, unboxed, loaded,read, and integrated, making the total time of transfer quite probably no better than 1Gig link between, at least for the amounts of data it would seem to be. I mean, the process of creating, transporting, and reading the tapes takes at least 36-48 hours start to finish since DHL is in the middle and depending on the type of tape technology we're talkin here. Considering we're talking about financial institutions and tape ..omg .. heaven forbid they're the old 9-track 6250bpi tapes that only hold like 200MB 😉

Anyway, I certainly don't know the real quantities of data involved but transmission still would seem to be better than tape for this particular case. <shrug> Since the article only mentioned 2 million names (customer records), lets assume 2kB per record even. That's less than 5G to transfer...

ah well, nvm ... its over with now anyway 🙂