Secure Banking Part Deux
Well, HSBC did get back to me, and quite frankly, I'm still disappointed with them. Apparently, they won't actually even begin looking at my complaint until they can tie it to my account. Presumably they're using some daft computer system concocted by a sadistic management team who have little understanding of how things work in the real world.
So, if I want them to follow up on my complaint, I need to send them personal details over insecure email, or equally insecure postal mail. Needless to say I wasn't chomping at the bit to do that.
In the end I settled for giving them as little information as I could get away with that wasn't already quite public anyway.
Fail Mail
On a related topic, I recently got an email from a company that I'm using a hosted website chat module on for a site that I manage. Well, this company had a problem with one of their servers which meant that the chat was down for a little while, and they were good enough to email all the customers on that server to let them know. Now, credit where credit is due, that's not the sort of thing I'd get from the hosting company I use for my own website at the moment (in-fact, I'd be lucky to get a timely response from them even if I'd found and asked them about a problem with the hosting)
So what was my gripe you might ask? Well, it seems that normally this same server is used to send out the customer emails automatically, but the problem was such that this too was out of action, and the person responsible for sending the customer email manually clearly wasn't familiar with some of the quite basic parts of it, namely blind carbon-copying.
You see, the email I received contained every single customers email address in the To field, so that all 50 of us were privvy to each others email address. I didn't particularly care too much about this, as I publish my email address on my own website for all to see should they wish. However, I doubt that everyone on that list would have been so inclined!
These two things in the past 7 days have done little to allay my fears that people are just not security conscious enough. When the government and its contractors are continually losing private data and the media brewing up a storm each time the next big loss is discovered, it seems that there are still people in businesses who seem quite oblivious to what impact their actions may have when it comes to keeping information safe and secure.
