A Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. official has said that a former employee “inadvertently†breached information of approximately 44,000 FDIC clients in February by downloading data to a personal storage device, the Washington Post reported Monday.Joe Davidson writes Lawrence Gross Jr., chief information officer at FDIC, wrote in a March 18 memo to FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg that the employee returned the device to FDIC a day after the agency detected the data breach on Feb. 29 through the use of a system designed to monitor downloads to storage devices.
“The FDIC’s investigation does not indicate that any sensitive information has been disseminated or compromised,” Gross, also chief privacy officer at FDIC, said in the memo obtained by the newspaper.
“The FDIC’s relationship with the employee has not been adversarial,” he added.
Barbara Hagenbaugh, a spokeswoman for FDIC, said some of the information affected by the breach include names, Social Security numbers and addresses of agency clients.
FDIC has prohibited the use of portable data storage devices for most of its personnel and will extend the policy to other employees, she added.
