Ethics, Data Breaches, and Conduct at Commonwealth Bank of Australia

This case study examines the ethical and professional practice issues faced by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), focusing on incidents such as data breaches, money laundering allegations, and controversies related to environmental projects. The report details how these incidents negatively impacted the bank's reputation and customer trust. It analyzes the steps CBA could have taken to prevent these breaches, including enhanced data protection measures, stricter monitoring of network activities, and comprehensive security training for employees. Additionally, the report references CBA's code of conduct and modified banking practices, emphasizing the importance of transparency and ethical behavior in maintaining customer relationships and regulatory compliance. The case study concludes that proactive measures and adherence to ethical guidelines are crucial for preventing future incidents and restoring stakeholder confidence.

Running Head: Ethics and Professional Practice
Ethics and Professional Practice
Common Wealth Bank of Australia

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Ethics and Professional Practice
Executive Summary
The Australian bank named Common Wealth Bank of Australia is very well known to be one of
the largest of all banks when financial sector is talked of. The firm is large because of the hard
work of stakeholders and new ideas. Ethics and the ethical code of conduct play a significant role
when sustainability comes into picture. Even a single unethical move can cause the firm to come
in the collapsing mode. CBA had to face the ethical dilemma which caused its reputation to go
down in the eyes of the customers.

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Ethics and Professional Practice
Contents
Executive Summary.....................................................................................................................................1
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................3
Background of Bank.....................................................................................................................................3
Case Analysis...............................................................................................................................................3
Steps to prevent such Situations.................................................................................................................4
Code of Conduct..........................................................................................................................................5
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................5
References...................................................................................................................................................6

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Ethics and Professional Practice
Introduction
At the time when common wealth bank lost the image which had positive impact in the
customers because of the unethical activities, their customers started decreasing a lot (Tariq,
2018). All the consumers went in the social media for complaining about the irresponsible
behavior which the bank had shown towards them (Review, 2018). Since, this breach happened,
the customers started detaching themselves from the bank and even wanted to remove or delete
their account from the same bank.
Background of Bank
CBA which is also known as Common Wealth Bank of Australia is a chain that is multinational
and gives many financial services across the world (Commbank, 2018). There are multiple other
services provided by the bank such as stocks services, insurance, banking in business, retail,
investments, management of funds etc. Since the year 2015, this bank has really made its mark in
the market and the Australian securities exchange too. It is headquartered in Sydney and it also
operates in the New Zealand, Fiji, Asian countries and United States. It has approximately
11,000 branches and has approximately 51,700 staff members in totality. The major assets till
2016 of the bank were 740 US Dollars.
Case Analysis
The largest banks names involves Common wealth banks name too in terms of the financing and
profiting market. Still the bank was in news for several times due to the controversies it was
involved into. Prior to the year 2015, it was in news for the support of the reef threatening
mining projects & also provided amount to Great Barrier Reef project. From that day, protests
not in favor of the bank were incepted (Collett, 2018). Then in the year 2016, CBA was again
found at fault in the Ponzi scheme scam. Then in 2017, the bank again had to face the allegations
for the money laundering and the data breaching issue. Australian Transaction Reports and

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Ethics and Professional Practice
Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), the financial agency, had put civil actions in the Australian Court
for this type of breach. Intelligent Deposit Machines or IDM’s that are known for constructing
the computerized money for common people & that also permits the customers to take out cash
even at the time when the bank is not working, were being used by money filtering syndicates
and also using some amount of money for the drug trade in and networking (Doran, 2018). These
syndicated were also capable of depositing the money without any I card or identification
multiple times, out of which only once it was exposed in the report of CBA that 20 million
dollars were put down in the 11 common wealth bank accounts. The bank was completely not
capable of providing or displaying the legitimacy about the data for such cases.
Steps to prevent such Situations
There can be some steps taken for such situation of data breach to prevent. They are:
1. The information that seems sensitive should be protected where it is stored so that it is
out of reach for the hackers (P, 2017).
2. The firm should ban the data transfer to any of the devices and if not possible, it should
just reduce it.
3. Unnecessary downloading can be avoided or restricted.
4. The devices which are unlocked should be banned in the premises. Unprotected and
unlocked devices are prone to attacks.
5. The systems that check the password settings in a regular way, the servers and firewall
configuration too may help in reduction of the risk.
6. Whenever there is a suspicion seen in the network activity, the team of security should
stay prepared in identifying the threats in network (Graham, 2017).
7. To prevent the case of leakage of data, the data should be kept monitored regularly by the
security team. Regularly the check of the internet contents is to be done for this.
8. People who are really important for sharing the sensible data should only be the ones who
should get the accessibility of the data.
9. Security training should be given to all the people so that they can secure the data
whenever possible.

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Ethics and Professional Practice
Code of Conduct
CBA is a party to the modified code of banking practices. These practices needs people to make
obtainable to people to be aware of the general knowledge on the series of banking events and
cases which involves, the rights and compulsions of all parties in a banker/client relationship,
 Handle personal info.
 What is to be done in case of financial issues.
 What is to be done when one has a complaint (Commbank, 2017).
Under clause 40, Common wealth bank has the guidelines for providing the users the
information related to how dealing can be done with the applications related to the moving of
mortgages and consents.
There is another put into effect debts exaggerated by Family Law Property Settlements.
Conclusion
Data breach is one of the things which happen every now and then these days. Cyber crimes and
other types of crimes are a part of everyday life. This report focuses on the case of Common
Wealth Bank which was involved in the data breach incidents and because of this many of its
customers wanted to delete their accounts from the bank. All the customers who trusted the bank
blindly did no more trust the bank. A complete case study is shared in this report with some of
the steps to prevent the breaches. There is a code of conduct followed by Common wealth bank.
These are mentioned in the report as well. In conclusion, one can say that commonwealth bank
could have prevented these breaches and unethical moves by implementing the steps of
prevention of breaches.

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Ethics and Professional Practice
References
Collett, M., 2018. Commonwealth Bank: Here's what you should know about the data breach if
you're a customer. [Online] Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-03/what-cba-
customers-need-to-know-about-the-data-breach/9722614 [Accessed 6 September 2018].
Commbank, 2017. Corporate Responsibility. Common Wealth Bank.
Commbank, 2018. About Commonwealth Bank. [Online] Available at:
https://www.commbank.com.au/about-us.html?ei=CB-footer_about-commbank [Accessed 6
September 2018].
Doran, M., 2018. Commonwealth Bank to pay $700m fine for anti-money laundering, terror
financing law breaches. [Online] Available at:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-04/commonwealth-bank-pay-$700-million-fine-money-
laundering-breach/9831064 [Accessed 6 September 2018].
Graham, A., 2017. Five simple ways businesses can avoid a data breach. [Online] Available at:
https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/blog/five-simple-ways-businesses-can-avoid-a-data-breach/
[Accessed 6 September 2018].
P, R., 2017. 15 ways to prevent data security breaches. [Online] [Accessed http://bigdata-
madesimple.com/15-ways-to-prevent-data-security-breaches/ September 2018].
Review, F., 2018. Commonwealth Bank under fire again for data breach of 19m accounts.
[Online] Available at: https://www.afr.com/technology/web/security/commonwealth-bank-
admits-customer-data-breach-affecting-19-million-accounts-20180502-h0zkh7 [Accessed 6
September 2018].
Tariq, N., 2018. Impact of cyberattacks on financial institutions. Journal of Internet Banking and
Commerce, 23(2).