14 DAY TRIAL // This is just another case of one company being sued for something that isn't really their fault. The state of Connecticut is suing IT consulting giant Accenture after sensitive information about state bank accounts and dozens of taxpayers has leaked, as the SC Magazine informs us. Thing is, they didn't get sued because they didn't have enough security measures and data got breached? that wasn't the case. Also, no hacker or malicious insider meddled with the info.
What actually happened is that a storage device had been stolen from an intern's car. Intern of Accenture, of course. What got state representatives really angry isn't the fact it got stolen as company officials would have been able to predict that a thief would break into a car and steal that particular backup tape. They were rather upset with the fact that it had been stolen in Ohio, and they (the company) had no right to move the data like that and should have treated it with more care.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Superior Court in Hartford, accuses Illinois-based Accenture of "illegal negligence, unauthorized use of state property and breach of contract", according to the site I mentioned earlier. The state had been paying a lot to Accenture and now they want their money back, because the company had failed to protect the data that they were using. If the data will be used maliciously cannot be predicted at this moment, but in any case, a breach is a breach and an unsatisfied client has the right to sue.
However, this is not the first time this thing happens. A lot of firms have reported laptops stolen or storage devices missing, all with secret info on them. However, ID theft has not been a consequence of these thefts. The thieves weren't after the data, but after the piece of hardware. Like I've said before, hackers that want to breach info databases, not steal from cars!