Bank's email security breach contained with help from Google
Thursday, October 1, 2009
An employee of Rocky Mountain Bank accidentally sent an email containing highly sensitive information on over 1,300 bank customers to a Gmail account last month, triggering a flurry of legal activity which culminated in Google deleting all traces of the data involved.
After the mistake was discovered and the Gmail account holder in question did not respond to requests from the bank to destroy the sensitive data, the bank filed a restraining order asking that access to the Gmail account be suspended to prevent the further dissemination of the data.
Google complied with the court order, and helped to verify that the email containing the sensitive data had never been opened. The message was "permanently destroyed by Google's systems," a lawyer for the bank told CNET news.
Experts said that the incident raises questions about the legal ramifications of the case, in which a court order locking the email account of a blameless person was upheld. Tech analyst Jim Rapoza, writing at Eweek, points out that the request for deletion from a Wyoming bank might look like spam to a savvy internet user, making it difficult to blame them for being non-responsive.
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