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Justin Grant
Justin Grant
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Who Needs Hackers? Morgan Stanley Loses Personal Data of 34,000 Clients the Old-School Way

For a company that's worth more dead than alive, losing sensitive customer data was the last thing Morgan Stanley needed.

For a company that's worth more dead than alive, losing sensitive customer data was the last thing Morgan Stanley needed.

But earlier this week, Credit.com reported that the struggling brokerage operator lost the personal information of more than 34,000 Morgan Stanley Smith Barney clients. That information includes names, addresses, account and tax identification numbers, and the granddaddy of them all: social security numbers.

Apparently the firm mailed two discs containing the data to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. But those discs were missing by the time the package reached its intended destination.

Ouch. But at least MSSB will pay for a years worth of free credit monitoring by Experian for the victims. Yeah, that should square things away for those 34,000 customers.

From Credit.com:

Of course the best question is why CD-ROMs were used to transmit the data in the first place. Since reporting of this kind is done routinely every year, why shouldn't there be a secure communications link between the sender and the recipient? And it would be cheaper, too - something state government really does care about at this particular moment.

As the Senior Editor of Advanced Trading, Justin Grant plays a key role in steering the magazine's coverage of the latest issues affecting the buy-side trading community. Since joining Advanced Trading in 2010, Grant's news analysis has touched on everything from the latest ... View Full Bio
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