How to get your business in the news for all the wrong reasons – Fidelity Life investments shows us how

USB stick with Fidelity Life investments information stolen

A USB stick with sensitive information about 1200 clients of a life insurance company – including personal bank account details – has been stolen from an employee’s car.

Fidelity Life chief executive Milton Jennings said the stick had been in an employee’s satchel which he left in his car as he attended a meeting at the company’s Lower Hutt office.

“Unfortunately somebody broke in and stole the satchel. They probably threw it away but as a precaution we had to contact police, the Financial Markets Authority and the Privacy Commissioner, and also the clients.”

Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/

You would hope a business of that size would have a security policy that dealt with business data stored on removable disks including encrypting the data.

You would have also thought that management would not allow a USB stick to be used to store incredibly sensitive data even if the data was encrypted (at a guess in this case I doubt it).

What is wrong with some businesses? This is incredibly basic security!!

First off if you don’t understand encryption get some one in who can explain – and before that – don’t carry bloody sensitive data around on a USB stick!!

I bet the person also uses free wifi to get his business email and login into business systems.