10:58am Tuesday 31st August 2010
PERSONAL records of Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) customers in York and North and East Yorkshire were never at risk after an unencrypted laptop was stolen.
That is the assurance from a spokeswoman at the Information Commissioners Office after finding the YBS in breach of the Data Protection Act because of the incident.
The laptop belonged to the former Chelsea Building Society, which had recently merged with YBS, and was stolen from its Cheltenham premises. It contained a substantial part of the CBS customer database, but no YBS data from Yorkshire.
It was recovered within 48 hours of YBS appointing private investigators, and forensic investigations revealed that none of the data had been accessed during that time, although there had been several attempts to do so.
The laptop was being used by a CBS employee who had been working from home and had given it, on request, to a manager who returned it to CBS’s former head office in Cheltenham.
It was later discovered that the manager had written down the passwords to the computer and left these in a bag with the laptop under a desk overnight.
Iain Cornish, chief executive of Yorkshire Building Society, has agreed to take a series of remedial steps to ensure that such a data security breach does not happen again.
These include encryption (a measure already in place at YBS); making all staff are made aware of the company’s policies for the storage and use of personal data; and giving staff access only to the type and amount of personal data that is necessary for their work.
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