By Giuseppe Fonte
ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s influential parliamentary committee on security will hold a round of hearings on data storage following a major breach at the country’s biggest bank Intesa Sanpaolo, people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
Intesa Sanpaolo is under investigation by prosecutors in the southern Italian city of Bari after it emerged that the accounts of around 3,500 customers, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and former Prime Minister Mario Draghi, might have been violated.
The Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (COPASIR) is closely following the data breach case involving Intesa, the people said speaking on condition of anonymity because such matters are confidential.
COPASIR plans to collect information by summoning people who could have relevant information, but at present there are no scheduled hearings for Intesa executives, they added.
Intesa issued a public apology for the episode on Oct. 13 after Meloni acknowledged the reported incident in a television interview, saying she expected the judiciary to investigate what happened and any possible conspiracy behind it.
The bank’s board last week named General Antonio De Vita, a former senior police officer who recently retired from the force, as its head of security, a new division it created after the breach.
Banks’ IT security is a major concern for the industry’s supervisors.
Intesa’s rogue employee did not hack the system, another person with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The employee had clearance to access clients’ account data due to their role within the bank.
By spreading the access over a period of roughly two years the worker was able to avoid triggering the control system, which would detect, for example, an unusually high number of data requests relating to one account over a short time.
The official COPASIR agenda shows a hearing scheduled on Wednesday, Oct. 23 for Cabinet Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano, a senior government official in charge of intelligence matters.
Meetings of the committee are behind closed doors and no minutes of the topics discussed are published.
(Reporting by Giuseppe Fonte; Editing by Keith Weir)
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