Morrisons’ interim results: past year’s challenges
Employee arrest leads to new data strategy
Following the arrest of an employee for theft of personal information from its staff payroll system, Morrisons launched a three-step plan to safeguard its data.
Information – including names, addresses, bank details and salaries of more than 100,000 employees – was stolen, published on the internet and sent on a disc to The Mirror newspaper, in March.
The information was immediately taken off the website, preventing loss of customer data, Morrisons claimed.
The Mirror did not open the disc and instead returned it to Morrisons to give to police, who then launched their investigations.
The man was arrested on suspicion of making or supplying an article for use in fraud.
Detective chief inspector Gary Hooks, of Protective Services (Crime), said: “An employee of Morrisons has been arrested in Leeds this morning (March 17) in connection with an investigation into the theft of data from the company. He is currently in custody.”
The retailer purchased support from fraud prevention and credit risk firm Experian.
Its workers took to Facebook to vent their anger at the company. Many were furious that they did not find out about the data theft until they read about it in the news.