Privacy breach at Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation

Disclaimer; Markis did not complete this work for the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation. At the time of this artical, a job of this nature would have been too massive for our current production equipment. It would have been completed by a much larger mail house.

What happened?

The personal financial details of up to 20 Australians were accidently posted to an ABC producer. The documents included other people’s full names, their addresses and amounts that had been transferred to the fund. These customers were located around the country and belonged to various other funds.

How could have this happened?

1. Inserting machine fault; it’s possible the pages were accidently collated by a machine fault and inserted into one envelope.
2. A coding error; modern inserting machines use barcodes to look at each letter and determine what or how many sheets to insert. If a coding error allocated additional pages to a recipient’s letter, then the machine will collate these pages and insert into one envelope.
3. Combined machine fault with coding error; if the inserter machine faults, either via jam or other means requiring documents to be removed from the machine, jams removed, and documents reloaded, perhaps even restarted; it’s possible that the inserter machine couldn’t interpret where it was up to when reading the letters and kept feeding them into the collator until a match is found, in this case up to 20 additional letters.
4. Human error. It’s possible that during the inserting processes, a chunk of pages, perhaps accumulated from jams were reprinted and re-inserted accidently into one envelope instead of 20 letters into 20 envelopes.

How could this have been avoided?

1. With a machine fault, and clearing a jam or other error, once the machine is back up and running, it’s important to stop the job and double check the output and look for an unusual output, thick packs or any unusual number sequences. There are systems available that can look at the output and match it back to a database, flagging any issues for the operator.
2. A coding error can be difficult to find. I there is an over-reliance on fully automated systems without any operator intervention or checking then it’s very easy for these errors to slip through unnoticed. When processing hundreds of thousands of letters in a day it’s very easy for 20 to slip through unnoticed.
3. Combined machine and coding error are complicated to resolve. In my experience it is better to stop the job, re-evaluate, manually check all output. Any attempt to restart the job should be approached with extreme caution. It is better to delay a deadline, even a tight one, and at the expense of potentially upsetting a customer, then having a data breach on your hands.
4. If it’s human error, then mail house processes and procedures need to be looked at and updated accordingly.

For the individuals involved in the data breach, you are very lucky that your documents went to, I would say a trustworthy person, a professional ABC producer who knew what to do with them.

Read the article here.

Copyright secured by DigiproveSome Rights Reserved