Community Bank of Dearborn of Michigan is using a network monitoring device from the Mountain View, Calif., risk management hardware vendor Reconnex Corp. to protect sensitive data.
Reconnex said Tuesday that Community Bank tested some of its large systems in February and March and was one of the first companies to install the iGuard 1300 device, which was designed for small companies.
Reconnex's systems scan a network to spot the transmission of sensitive information, such as customers' account numbers, across the Internet. Such incidents could be a sign of employee theft of data that could later be used for identity theft.
Jeff Karafa, Community Bank's vice president of information architecture, said in an interview that during the test the Reconnex system discovered that an employee had accidentally sent a list of unencrypted Social Security numbers by e-mall to a third-party processor.
"It was an innocent mistake" but one that could have compromised customer privacy, he said.
Kim Getgen, the director of marketing for Reconnex, said, "The insider employee has access to all kinds of customer data. They're trusted, but the way they use the data can sometimes be inappropriate and damaging. We've seen employees doing really strange things with customer data."
Ms. Getgen said that this type of system lets banks look for problems that they may not have been able to observe previously. "All of a sudden you can see the hidden risk that you couldn't see before."
