The insider threat
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Is your personal information and other data safe in the hands of your bank, your phone company, your Internet service provider? The answer probably will have be a no, not really.
After the fiasco of mid November 2009 with T-Mobile, a cell phone provider in Britain and elsewhere having customer data sold by members of their staff to outsiders and in this case especially competitors of T-Mobile, who can be trusted. We have known for a long time that the government in the UK cannot be trusted with data as they tend to lose it but this is beginning to take on a different cloak altogether.
While there is a the so-called Data Protection Act, a law that makes the passing on of information to unauthorized parties a criminal offense the law in reality has very little in the way of teeth and punishments.
A few thousand pounds fine is the worst that can happen to someone who may have made tens of thousands of pounds from the sale of such data and other, more often than not rather personal information of people.
I know personally of cases where people have had their debit cards (and credit cards) cloned because of data supplied to the criminals by employees of the particular banks and financial service providers concerned. In one case the fraud investigation team of the bank tranced the fraud down rather quickly to an employee of the bank, in other cases it has taken longer and some of the culprits have yet to be caught, it would appear.
You can rightly, therefore, wonder how much more of this is going on and as to whether you data in, in fact as safe as you are told that it is. I certainly do and am rather concerned.
I also remember the incidents with call centers in a certain Asian country where employees seem to be taking data home routinely, without anyone seeming to realize and/or care.
The laws that apply in the UK and other EU countries and also the the USA as to the protection of data do not seem to reach as far as India, for instance, and things seem to be treated differently there.
What we can do to protect ourselves against such practices?
© 2009
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