A stolen hard drive is to blame for the incident

Sep 14, 2015 20:40 GMT  ·  By

Lloyds Bank has acknowledged a data breach that exposed the details of thousands of its customers, all due to a data storage device belonging to RSA (Royal Sun Alliance), stolen from one of its data centers.

Lloyds Bank and RSA collaborated between 2006 and 2012, RSA offering emergency home insurance to Lloyds Bank customers for £25/month ($38.5/month, €34/month).

The theft occurred this July, and ever since detecting the breach, RSA informed Lloyds Bank officials, which went on to send notification letters to all affected clients, as BBC reports.

Police were also notified, and an investigation was started into the matter.

RSA will cover identity protection services for affected clients

To help protect clients from having their identities stolen and their financial data used in fraudulent charges, Lloyds has urged customers to take out identity protection services for their account.

RSA offered to pay the £20 ($30.85/month, €27.25/month) fee that covers two years of identity protection services.

According to a spokesperson, the stolen hard drive contained information on Premier Account holders, like names, addresses, bank account numbers, and sort code details.

"We recognize this should never have happened and apologize to all customers who have been impacted," said the RSA spokesperson.

There are currently no reports that the data of the affected Lloyd Banks customers was used in any fraudulent operations.

UK, a prime target for fraudsters and hackers

A report from Gemalto shows that the UK is the European country where most data breaches were recorded, 63 out of the 94 total incidents recorded across Europe.

The only country above the UK was the US with 707 incidents, but a different study carried out by ThreatMatrix shows that, despite the large number of US-based data breaches, UK citizens are the most defrauded nation on Earth.

This is strange because the UK ranks 27th in the International Monetary Fund GDP per capita index, and 24th in the World Bank's similar index. The US ranks 10th and 9th, respectively.