Valuation firm loses bank

PROPERTY valuation firm LandMark White, which was founded on the Gold Coast, is urging its customers to stick with the company after major customer Commonwealth Bank suspended the use of the LandMark’s services in light of it’s latest data breach.

“Following LMW’s recent data incident, CBA can confirm we have indefinitely suspended the company from our valuation panel,” a company spokesman said.

“The safety and security of our customer information is of paramount importance to us.”

CBA joins ANZ in cutting ties with LandMark after the company confirmed the breach last Thursday.

LandMark said at the time that the data breach was not IT-related and didn’t need to be classified as a notifiable data breach under the Privacy Act.

In a statement to the market today, LandMark said that the information had been stolen and subsequently posted on document sharing site SCRIBD by a person known to the organisation.

“The vast majority of the documents uploaded to SCRIBD are 2017 residential “short form” valuations in PDF format and have very limited personal information recorded in them (limited to a name and address). (LandMark) suspects that this person has taken the documents from LMW via a manual process and is attempting to damage LMW’s brand and reputation, there is absolutely no indication that the person is attempting to derive personal gain from the disclosure,” the company said.

LandMark did not say in the statement that CBA and ANZ had suspended their workflows with the company. However, it urged its customer base to keep working with the company instead of “acting in a way that ultimately rewards the criminal attempting to damage LMW’s reputation.”