US bank exposes customer data

NEWS A major US bank has blamed "human error" for a blunder which saw it expose the email addresses of thousands of its online banking customers. Bank of the West sent out an email on Monday to alert customers to the fact that its banking system would be out of service for maintenance this weekend, but rather than leaving recipients names undisclosed by using the 'bcc' field, all names and addresses were included in the 'To' field - offering any would-be spammers a ready made distribution list of more than 3,300 live addresses. A company spokesman said: "It was an inadvertent mistake." Bank of the West emailed affected customers on Tuesday to apologise for the error. The apology email did not disclose the recipients' addresses. Troy Wolverton writes for News.com