Zurich Insurance fined £2.3m over customers' data loss

After our blog last week on the BBC losing laptops and mobile phones, it has been revealed that the UK operation of Zurich Insurance has been fined £2.27m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for losing personal details of 46,000 customers.

It is the highest fine levied on a single firm for data security failings.

The data on policyholders, including in some cases bank account and credit card information, went missing in August 2008.

However, Zurich did not become aware of the loss until a year later, when it then began notifying customers.

The information went missing during a routine transfer to a data storage centre in South Africa.

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Redstor have been focused on data management and protection since 1998 and have created one of the largest service provider enabled storage infrastructures (storage clouds) in the UK. Redstor Online Backup is re-branded by numerous well known service organisations and is the engine behind the Redstor Backup Service for Schools (RBUSS). Over 80 Local Authorities and education service providers use Redstor's online service to backup and restore the data of over 12,000 addressable schools in the UK.