Morgan Stanley’s settlement highlights the dangers of outsourcing your hard drive destruction.
Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has agreed to settle charges with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for its shocking failure to protect the personal information. In more than one instance, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MSSB) failed to adequately protect the personal information of millions of customers, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. MSSB has agreed to pay $35 million to settle these allegations. This settlement includes an allegation that over a the span of a five year period, going as far back as 2015, MSSB failed to properly dispose of hard drives and servers that contained personal data of thousand of customers. They hired a moving and storage company that had no expertise in data destruction services and MSSB failed to properly monitor and review the moving company’s work. Some personal data from these hard drives was found on an internet auction site. They recovered some, but not all of the devices that had thousands of pieces of unencrypted customer data.
In another instance, MSSB lost track of 42 servers that contained unencrypted customer data when it decommissioned a local office and branch servers as part of a hardware refresh program. During this process, MSSB learned devices being decommissioned had encryption capability but failed to activate that capability.
If your organization outsources hard drive destruction services then you could put your organization at risk for a data breach.
The products offered by Phiston Technologies meet NSA specifications in both destroying and making unreadable the contents of hard drives, CDs, USBs, DVDs; so you can be sure your data is safe from hackers and other cybercriminals who might try to steal private information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, sensitive customer information- to name a few. Don’t leave your data security up to chance. Contact us to learn about how our products allow you to do in-house data destruction so you don’t have to risk outsourcing your hard drive destruction to anyone who may not destroy it properly.
