Citigroup exposes 3.9 million customers

Citigroup announced earlier this week that personal details of 3.9 million consumer lending customers were lost by UPS while en route to a credit bureau.

How do you lose a set of tapes? I mean, UPS are supposed to be good at handling parcels – particularly ones that contain valuable information. Aren’t they?

And if you were CEO of Citigroup, and you knew that it was not unknown for storage partners to lose this sort of data (Time Warner, for instance, had lost 600,000 records just the month before), might you not have built the possibility into your risk assessment? (They do, I’m sure, do risk assessments at Citigroup.) And if you had, then might you not have spotted and provided for this risk as part of the “enhanced security procedures you require of your couriers”?

Or should we be thinking that the unenhanced security procedures were closer to, well, not much, really?

I’m sure we won’t be told.