It’s unlikely that one Japanese man will join his colleagues for after-work drinks again following their last night out, when officials said he lost a USB stick containing the personal data of nearly a half-million people.
The man, who has not been named, transferred the data Tuesday and then went to a restaurant with three of his colleagues at Biprogy Inc., Yuji Takeuchi, the president of the company’s Kansai branch, told a news conference Friday.
The USB contained the home addresses and bank account details of every one of the 460,000 residents of Amagasaki, officials in the small industrial city in Japan’s Hyogo prefecture said in a statement Thursday. It also identified households receiving public assistance, they said.
Takeuchi said the man “was in possession of his bag when he left the restaurant,” but then he “fell asleep on the street.” He woke up at 3 a.m. and went home before calling work six hours later to inform them he was taking the day off, Takeuchi added.
“At this time, there was no report of the loss of the bag,” Takeuchi said. That afternoon, the man reported the missing USB stick to his manager, he added.
“Nomikai,” or drinking parties after work, is common in Japanese workplaces and used to foster close employee relationships. They are nonetheless expected to show up at the office in the morning.
All’s well that ends well, however: The man was able to retrieve his bag with the help of his cellphone company, Takeuchi said.
Akiyoshi Hiraoka, the CEO and president of the Tokyo-based Biprogy Inc., which has been subcontracted to manage Amagasaki’s financial aid during the Covid pandemic, told the same news conference that the encryption and passwords on the two devices had not been changed.
He added that his employee had breached company rules by transferring the data to portable media like USB sticks. He said the company had not decided how to punish the man, but it would take strict measures after reviewing the facts.
Takeuchi said the company would be monitoring the dark web to make sure the data had not been leaked.
June 10, 202200:13
Given that the company was a subcontractor, the city’s government could also be liable for not effectively monitoring the data processing, Tatsuya Tsunoda, an associate at the Nishimura & Asahi law firm in Tokyo, told NBC News by email Friday.
If data is lost or damaged, “the third-party contractor must immediately notify of such data incident to the entrustor and then the entrustor must report it to the Personal Information Protection Commission and also must notify data subjects,” he said.
The council said in its statement that a committee of outside experts would be set up to investigate the incident and prevent it happening again.
Arata Yamamoto contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
