Her Majesty's tax and customs duties for the week
announced the largest “catastrophe” of its kind in all of UK history. Finance Minister Alistair Darling (Alistair Darling) at a meeting of parliament on Tuesday acknowledged the loss of two disks with personal financial information of 25 million citizens of the country. All of them are united by the fact that they received or applied for a child benefit.
Information on the discs included names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers and bank account information. All this was protected only with a password and can be easily opened by the attacker's hands.
Discs were lost during an audit in October. Then one of the younger employees sent them to the inspecting courier service, forgetting to note this fact properly. When, three weeks later, the package did not reach the addressee, the clerk repeated the dispatch. It is still unknown where the first package happened to be, but the police do not yet see any reason to believe that it fell into criminal hands.