By John M.
Doomers will remember this January 28th post when Admin and I expressed concern at the discovery that HP computers from a failed subprimer storefront operation were scheduled for disposal at auction (on Craigslist, yet) with no effort being made to wipe the disks. Well, it’s a month later and the situation seems to be escalating. A report [1] coming out of Las Vegas earlier this week suggests that disgruntled employees at distressed subprime lender Silver State Mortgage may actually be stealing computers from the company. Should this indeed be the case, this is potentially much more serious than the auction, as there is the real danger an insider may have continued access to sensitive information on media taken from the work site. Furthermore, there were hundreds [2] of employees effected by events at Silver State. Dozens of similarly sized subprime lenders have experienced major disruptions or even gone out of business since December, so the risk to consumer security may not be trivial.
Financial service industry regulators have strict rules regarding the protection of consumers against violations of privacy and identity theft. What I fear is that once a distressed company loses cohesion, these safeguards could become weakened. Once a company’s problems become serious enough to force significant layoffs of staff, who’s going to protect the paper files and electronic media? When a subprime lender implodes, somebody needs to secure their customers’ data.
Read the rest of this entry »
