Morgan Stanley Smith Barney says two CDs containing personal information on 34,000 investment clients were lost in transit to a government office.
The information included clients' names, addresses, account and tax identification numbers, the income earned on the investments in 2010 and some clients' Social Security numbers, company spokesman Jim Wiggins said. The brokerage, a Morgan Stanley joint venture with Citigroup Inc., told clients about the loss in a letter mailed in June.
The CDs, which were password protected but not encrypted, were lost after being mailed the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. The package appeared to be intact when it reached the agency, but the CDs were gone by the time the package reached the intended recipient, Wiggins says. "We searched every facility the package passed through."
The brokerage has seen no evidence of criminal intent or misuse of information, and it will offer a year of credit-monitoring services by a third party for clients whose Social Security numbers were on the CDs, Wiggins says. "We're examining with the state of New York how we can increase the security of this kind of data transmission," he says.
The data loss was originally reported by Credit.com.
