According to the ICO, the investigation looked at the theft of a hard drive device containing 59,592 customers’ names, addresses and bank account details.
It added that the device also held limited credit card details of 20,000 customers, but that CVC numbers and expiry dates were not affected.
Measures
Enforcement officers from the authority found that the insurer did not have the appropriate measures in place to protect financial information.
The device was stolen from RSA’s offices in West Sussex either by a member of staff or a contractor.
According to the ICO the information on it was not encrypted and the device has not been recovered.
Security
An RSA spokesperson said: “The ICO fined us for not foreseeing the risk that the theft of a storage device could cause and for not protecting it adequately.
“RSA serves nine million customers in over 100 countries and we take a breach of our security and protocols very seriously.”
The spokesperson continued: Whilst there remains no evidence to suggest that the stolen storage device has resulted in any economic loss for the customers involved; we recognise that this should have never have happened and we would like to say sorry once again to those of our customers and partners who were impacted.
“We have reviewed and reinforced our data protection procedures to mitigate the risk of this happening again – the substantive work that has been undertaken since then to improve date protection in our company has been acknowledged by the ICO.”
Failure
Steve Eckersley, ICO head of enforcement said: “Customers put their trust in companies to keep their information safe, particularly financial information.
“When we looked at this case we discovered an organisation that simply didn’t take adequate precautions to protect customer information.”
He continued: “Its failure to do so has caused anxiety for its customers not to mention potential fraud issues.
“There are simple steps companies should take when using this type of equipment including using encryption, making sure the device is secure and routine monitoring of equipment.”
Eckersley concluded: “RSA did not do any of this and that’s why we’ve issued this fine.”
This article is care of insurance age,and the original article can be found here http://www.insuranceage.co.uk/insurance-age/news/2480080/the-ico-fines-rsa-gbp150-000http://www.insuranceage.co.uk/insurance-age/news/2480080/the-ico-fines-rsa-gbp150-000
