A Look At Gov't Data Losses
The U.S. government says it's lost -- yes, lost -- an entire hard drive full of sensitive data. The external drive, stored at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, held personal data from the Clinton era, including information about White House staff and visitors and electronic storage tapes from the Executive Office of the President.
* What a U.S. military contractor evidently forgot to send out.
Throw this one into the "how not to manage security" file: Just this month, security researchers announced they'd located launch procedures for a U.S. missile air defense system on a hard drive bought off eBay. The drive, reports indicated, had detailed information about a system used to shoot down missiles in Iraq, along with security policies, facility blueprints, and the always popular list of employee Social Security numbers.
The drive has been tied to Lockheed Martin, which developed the aforementioned defense system. In its defense, though, other drives bought off eBay in the same sweep were found to contain bank medical records, business plans, and detailed information about bank accounts, among other things. So at least it has some company in the "d'oh!" department.
1. The U.K.'s Vanishing Disks. And Hard Drives. And Memory Sticks. And Computers.
Impressive as those feats are, there's little question the U.K. takes the cake when it comes to dumb data mistakes over the past months. The nation's top government number crunchers probably can't even keep count of stupid slip-ups that have plagued various agencies. There were the lost laptops (45,000 citizens' information exposed; 30,000 of them never notified), the lost CDs (3,000 workers' data disappeared; information all unencrypted), the lost drivers' data (3 million Department of Transport files misplaced), the lost military laptop (620,000 recruits' info exposed), and the lost prison system memory stick (84,000 prisoners' information set free). And that's just the tip of the idiotic iceberg.
The BBC estimates the U.K. government fumbled about 4 million people's personal information within a single year, from mid-2007 to mid-2008. It's not just the small stuff, either: The government apparently was losing computers at a rate of one PC per week for a while, too, some analyses suggested.
Not that anyone's counting. Quite obviously.
Connect with JR Raphael on Twitter (@jr_raphael) or via his Web site, jrstart.com.
U.S. Department of Defense
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