Lawyer sees almost 1,000 complainants sign up to Capita breach class action

The law firm that last month sent a Letter of Claim to Capita over a security breach in late March says it has signed up nearly 1,000 clients as it prepares a class action lawsuit aimed at the outsourcing giant. UK-based Capita confirmed the cyber-burglary in early April, saying at the time intruders had spent nine days on the …

[teebie]

"Megabuyte pointed out that reputational damage [to Capita] will be far greater."

How? Capita couldn't damage their reputation any further if they changed their name to Hermes.

Or Chernobyl.

[TimMaher]

Re: Chernobyl

Maybe it’s time for them to flag a ride from Charon?

[Lurko]

Not to mention that the general standards in the pension administration sector are dismal. I've had a lot of dealings over the past year with three large (non-Capita) pension administrators, and at every turn they've been slow, unhelpful, unresponsive, incompetent and denied obvious errors that are shown in black and white in their own records. In my entire life I've never come across a sector that seems so routinely poor and disinterested in the people it is there to serve.

I suspect the problem is that pension fund trustees rarely or never change their administrator, so its money for old rope, and there's no consequences for failure. In this case Capita will take a modest penalty from the ICO, but the corporate culture will remain unchanged.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Lurka

"In my entire life I've never come across a sector that seems so routinely poor and disinterested in the people it is there to serve."

You never heard of Estate agents or Solicitors? And don't get me started on Politicians...

Wonder what percentage of each quid of compo (if any) the solicitors will take?

[donk1]

Would Liberata be one of those?

https://www.moneymarketing.co.uk/news/fsa-fines-liberata-525000-for-system-failures/

https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/final-notices/liberata.pdf

"In total, LFS administers over 1.8 million life and pensions policies comprising over 3,000 different types of savings, investment and retirement products."

"LFS staff must determine the cause of the error message (which is in system code)"

"training for staff was inadequate."

"messages were in system code, rather than 'plain English', making their interpretation difficult."

"Throughout the Relevant Period, LFS failed to take reasonable care to establish effective procedures to investigate and resolve error messages."

"Between January 2005 and December 2005, LFS failed to put in place any controls to monitor the dispatch of documents."

"LFS's reliance on the management information as the only tool to monitor the performance of CIC was not acceptable."

"During the Relevant Period, LFS conducted only sporadic and limited reviews of CIC to ensure that it was operating effectively. In fact, between January 2005 and March 2006, LFS did not conduct any review of CIC."

"As a result of LFS's failure to implement controls which were appropriate for its business, throughout the Relevant Period, it was unable to monitor adequately whether documents were being dispatched to policyholders as required."

"LFS therefore failed to act with due skill, care and diligence by not considering adequately, and acting on, warning signals identified in its management information and not acting properly on clear indications in the March 2006 audit, that policyholders were at risk of not receiving documents."

"As set out in paragraph 5.21 above, the FSA considers that LFS's assumption throughout 2006 that all of the documents within outstanding Contacts were legitimately suppressed was reckless."

"LFS uses a number of automated systems to administer policies. Its principal system, 'Amarta', is a bespoke system developed and maintained by LFS."

Give that my CV and I believe LinkedIn profile mention Liberata, how does this not reflect on me?

[Terry 6]

I was about to post the same, I'm a day late.

But "Capita" and "reputation" in the same sentence.............

The only surprise, expressed so often here and elsewhere, is why the f*** people keep giving them the business.

How often do they need to provide ghastly, incompetent, over priced, inadequate service before people stop throwing more money to them???

[Anonymous Coward]

Gubbermint employees are not people, they’re mindless drones, so that clears that question up

[Lee D]

One day this is going to happen to Azure, AWS or Google Cloud.

I believe it's already happened to places like UKCloud and Rackspace.

I don't know why anyone would ever think that it wouldn't. But if we don't punish this one, then when it all goes wrong everyone will go "Oh, who knew?! Maybe we should do something about it for next time?". Capita need to be made an example off to try to head off an actual, proper, serious cloud breach.

[Doctor Syntax]

Capita are well back in the queue of organisations waiting to be made an example of but so far it's not happened to any of them.

[Will Godfrey]

There's a long queue of ne'er-do-wells

{cough} Post Office {cough}

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Given recent developments, my money's on Azure.

Now, where did I put that popcorn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moved my Capita pension away elsewhere years ago. I don't want Capita anywhere near my money! I see Capita shares are way down today according to my iPhone's Shares app. So much bad news and I laugh to see this company's misfortunes. You could not make it up. How long will this outfit keep going for?