The Bank of New York Mellon has lost data on 4.5 million customers when one of the ten backup tapes went missing while transporting to a storage facility. The backup tape holding personal information of customers was not encrypted.
It happened three months ago but was only revealed this week.
The Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal said:
Hundreds of thousands of Connecticut residents may be affected. This security breach seems highly dangerous, indeed possibly devastating in light of the identity theft threat.
The storage tape, which contained sensitive information of The Bank of New York Mellon Shareholder Services customers, was lost Feb. 27, being transfered to a storage facility by Archive Systems, a New Jersey-based records storage company.
The tapes are still untraceable.
The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, is a global financial services company formed on 1 July 2007 as result of the merger of The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation. It plans to offer one year of free credit monitoring to affected individuals. They said to have launched an investigation immediately after the incident and have taken measures to prevent it from happening again.
Blumenthal said:
I am especially concerned by the delay in informing consumers, possibly heightening the risks of wrongdoing. The loss of this tape so far unrecovered and unremedied is inexplicable and unacceptable.
The bank issued a statement saying Shareowner Services have no evidence suggesting that any of the data has been inappropriately accessed or used. Communications with affected share owners include that assurance.
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