Animals-Domestic

UK FSA fines Zurich Insurance for customer data loss

Contributed by Roumiana Deltcheva (August 25, 2010)

The UK's Financial Services Authority recently fined Zurich Insurance, a Swiss insurance company, the equivalent of $3.5 million for losing the sensitive, personal data of more than 46,000 customers.

There is currently no evidence that any of the data has been used illegally, but the loss of bank account and credit card information increases the possibility of identity theft and other crimes.

The data loss occurred when Zurich Insurance outsourced its data storage to its South African unit, but the group lost the backup tape containing the customer data. However, the company did not discover the data-leak prevention failure until more than one year later, which drove up the amount of the fine.

"Zurich UK let its customers down badly," Margaret Cole, the FSA's director of enforcement and financial crime, said. "To make matters worse, Zurich UK was oblivious to the data loss incident until a year later."

American regulatory organizations have also targeted financial firms in 2010 for failing to properly archive data. Most notably, the Financial Regulatory Authority fined investment bank Piper Jaffray $700,000 for failing to archive more than 4 million emails in a six-year span.

http://www.messagingarchitects.com/resources/security-compliance-news/email-security/uk-fsa-fines-zurich-insurance-for-customer-data-loss19930960.html

Hard Drive but No PC

Author: Lincoln Spector

PC World
Friday, April 16, 2010; 12:19 AM

Jen's PC died. All she has left is the hard drive, which contains three years worth of files. How does she get that back?

Depending on its age, the hard drive almost certainly has either an IDE or a SATA interface. Both of these are standard and easy to access.

All you need is an adapter that converts SATA or IDE to USB, which will essentially turn your old, internal drive into a temporary external one. The adapter will also need an AC power source.

The BYTECC BT-300 USB 2.0 Drive Mate makes a good choice. Nothing fancy, but it works.

Once the drive is plugged in, you can search its contents and copy the files you need.

Now for the lecture: If the hard drive had died rather than another part of the laptop, you'd be in a much more serious situation. You would have lost your photos, documents, and everything else on your PC.

You need to back up your hard drive--or at the very least the data folders--every day. The concept is simple: Never have only one copy of anything. See 7 Backup Strategies for Your Data, Multimedia, and System Files for backup options.

I corrected an error. My thanks to boden for pointing it out.

About the Author: If you have other tech questions, email them to me at answer@pcworld.com, or post them to a community of helpful folks on the PCW Answer Line forum.