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State Street Suffers Data Theft: Page 2 of 4

State Street did not respond to Byte and Switch’s requests for comment, although The Boston Globe reports that the initial information sent over to the third-party vendor was encrypted. The legal support specialist then decrypted this data and stored it on a hard drive that was subsequently stolen, according to the report.

The drive, which contained names, addresses, and, in some cases, Social Security numbers, was apparently stolen in December and reported to State Street the following month. The financial firm did not disclose the theft until yesterday because it took months to determine who was affected, according to the Globe.

Another northeastern company attempting to resolve a major storage snafu is the Bank of New York Mellon, which recently confirmed the loss of a backup tape potentially containing information on some 4.5 million customers.

The missing tape fiasco first hit the headlines last week, when Connecticut Attorney General and privacy advocate Richard Blumenthal blasted the Bank, citing the potential impact on hundreds of thousands of Connecticut residents.

The unencrypted backup tape was one of 10 tapes given to records management specialist Archive Systems for transportation to a storage facility on February 27, he explained, although only nine tapes made it to the storage site.