Ameritrade Customer Data Lost 324
Rollie Hawk writes "Continuing the recent trend of customer data blunders in the news, Ameritrade has announced the loss of the personal data of up to 200,000 customers. The suspected cause is a routing error, but not the network kind. The online discount broker admitted that a backup tape of customer account data from 2000 to 2003 has been misplaced. They claim the cause is an error on the part of a shipping company. The tape was identified as missing in February, soon after being shipped. According to spokeswoman Donna Kush, nothing suspicious has been reported. Further blaming the shipping company, she explained that "this was not an Ameritrade Systems issue or a compromise of our technology. This was related to a third party vendor." It's doubtful that current and former customers with exploited information will care how this occurred. She further claimed that Ameritrade "has every reason to believe" that the tape has either been destroyed or is being held by the shipper. There's no word yet on how they arrived at this conclusion."
Luckily.. (Score:5, Funny)
oh HooRay!
In Other News (Score:5, Funny)
As an Ameritrade customer I'd be worried... (Score:4, Funny)
Compressed Data Secure? (Score:2, Funny)
"the missing back-up tape contained compressed data that would require very advanced computer systems to access."
http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/19/technology/amer
Note she did not say encrypted. Modern tape software is often intelligent enough to recognize not only its own compression algorithms, but also formats and algorithms used by other vendors. Maybe Ameritrade thinks they are one of the only companies in the world utilizing LTO, or maybe LTO-2?
News at 11, [insert company name here] loses data (Score:5, Funny)
We could then refuse to do business with those companies on the grounds that they were obviously lying.
FOR SALE (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ameritrade Customer Service (Score:4, Funny)
And that's when you tell them that just because it's 4/20 does not mean they can be high at work.
Re:actually.... (Score:5, Funny)
Recently, we were sending all of the money in your account to another branch and, well, it got lost on the way. Sorry, shit happens.
Sincerely,
Your Bank
Re:Data loss... or ... data collection? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:MOD PARENT UP! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Question (Score:5, Funny)
That's correct. The tape is unreadable with human eyes.
Easy to restore (Score:3, Funny)
Dear valued Ameritrade customer:
Due to computers errors, we may have lost some of your informations. Please go to the following web site and verify your informations. Please do so as soon as possible or your account may be suspended. Thank you.
http:/256.123.321.201/Ameritrade.html
Re:Question (Score:3, Funny)