December 18th, 2007
Capital One customers experience data corruption
My colleague Justin James has issued a warning to all Capital One customers about data corruption in his blog titled “Capitol One: What’s in your database?“. If you’re a Capital One customer, I would highly recommend reading this so that you can save yourself some headaches.
But, at the end of the day, Capitol One committed more than one of the top 10 “thou shall not’s” in IT with this incident.
- It allowed data to be severely corrupted.
- It deployed code without an appropriate rollback or backout plan or path.
- It did not notify its customers despite that the mistake is costing its customers to have late payments, resulting in fees and credit history problems if uncorrected.
- It did not properly prepare the customer service team to handle the situation.
- It allowed the user to see that data had been corrupted, which has destroyed all trust in the system.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
