Home > Storage

Computerworld - ABN Amro Mortgage Group Inc. said it plans to stop sending data tapes to its credit-reporting bureaus after a tape containing personal information on more than 2 million customers was temporarily lost late last year.

Group CEO Thomas Goldstein announced that the company has been working since last spring on a plan to encrypt data and send it over secure networks whenever possible. The project is slated to be completed this month.

The plans were disclosed on Dec. 19, the same day the company located the missing tape.

ABN Amro told customers that the tape was lost on Nov. 18 while being transported by the DHL Worldwide Express delivery service. It was on its way from a data center run by a subsidiary of LaSalle Bank Corp. in Chicago to an Experian Information Solutions Inc. credit bureau facility in Allen, Texas.

The tape contained the names, account information, payment histories and Social Security numbers of residential mortgage customers, according to a letter ABN Amro sent to customers.

Goldstein said there was no evidence that the data was misused, but he acknowledged that there is no way to prove that the tape wasn't read or copied while missing.

Goldstein said the package containing the missing tape was found at a DHL facility in Ohio in its original sealed container, without the air bill, and that DHL then readdressed the package back to ABN Amro.

Service Woes

The problems for ABN Amro didn't end there. An offer to affected customers for a free credit-monitoring service overwhelmed a Web site run by credit-reporting agency Trans Union LLC. The free service was first offered for 90 days and then quickly extended to a year after customers complained that 90 days wasn't long enough.

Goldstein said ABN Amro has completed about 70% of its rollout of a secure data network for moving data to its credit-reporting bureaus."

The goal starting last spring was to eliminate all physical handling of tapes," Goldstein said. But in cases where the recipient can't handle electronic data, tapes will be sent via special courier, he added.

"One of the really upsetting things about this is one more month, and this couldn't have happened," Goldstein said.

An IT manager whose personal mortgage information happened to be lost said he's frustrated because no matter how careful he is about identity theft, he's "at the mercy of other entities out there."

The manager said his company, which he asked not to be identified, replicates data across private T1 lines to a disaster recovery