A Finextra member 08 July, 2008, 20:36 0 likes

Any breach is serious.

How would you propose to rate the seriousness of a breach?

Like a score - say you get extra points if you had the lost data encrypted? 256Bit? 2048 bit? What type? How many points?

I would guess that all that would achieve would be more data going missing, albeit with varying levels of encryption.

Hypothetical:
Perhaps you only lost the customer's card numbers and names, and someone else lost their addresses, names and phone numbers, and then someone else lost their PINs. Criminals use the combined data to commit fraud. Who is most at fault? Is no-one at fault? Is no breach serious?

We live in a digital connected world. So do the criminals.

Every breach should be treated equally as a serious breach, in the absence of absolute proof to the contrary. Pay the price now and argue about it after 5 years - if you can prove that nothing eventuated from the breach.

There once was a time when banking was built on trust, these days it seems it's mainly propaganda.

The shifting of liability to the customer for internet banking along with wanting to not even notify them if they have been compromised is the final death knell of banking as we have known it.

Trust is absent. The current financial crisis is clear demonstration. The consumers will realise it soon. For the banks all will change, many will perish and they will have brought it on all by themselves, before technology could even do it to them -  they just leapt off the central pillar of banking - trust.

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