This is a special blog entry concerning a major breach right here in my home state of Oklahoma.

For those who don’t know, MyLaptopGPS is headquartered in Stillwater, OK, which is about 60 miles north of Oklahoma City and 70 miles west of Tulsa.

The news is all abuzz right now as the Oklahoma Department of Human Services revealed a laptop containing highly sensitive information about approximately one million Oklahomans was stolen from an employee’s car. Does this sound familiar? It should–just browse around our website, and pay particular attention to the full Chronicle page for more than 600 examples of similar breaches and issues.

Laptop security is of crucial importance to the privacy and protection of citizens in every nation around the world. It matters to Americans, to Canadians, to the Japanese. It matters to New Yorkers, to Californians, and it matters to Oklahomans. In fact, this is confirmed by a news story on KOCO Channel 5 in which I appeared, where other Oklahomans voiced concerns about the data privacy issues raised here. I later appeared in a story on KFOR Channel 4 to discuss the topic further.

Laptop security with a 99.6% success rate is possible using the solid principles we are and have been advocating at MyLaptopGPS.

In fact, I’ve spoken with state officials on several occasions over the past year, most recently on February 25, about protecting their fleet of laptops, which number in the thousands. But as of April 3 (the date of the theft itself), it appears the state had not implemented a top-to-bottom laptop security program.

Had the DHS laptop been protected with the kind of multi-level security offered by MyLaptopGPS, they would have very likely prevented the theft in the first place (99.6% speaks for itself). If a theft had occurred, we could have tracked the laptop, recovered any data that hadn’t been backed up on systems behyind the DHS firewall, and destroyed any and every data file on the laptop–all remotely and all without the thief’s knowledge.

Instead, the State of Oklahoma (DHS) has already spent $150,000 in Oklahoma tax revenue merely to send the notification letter to half its database. Presumably, another $150,000 to come for the other half. That’s $300,000 in Oklahoma taxpayer funds merely for notification, and we haven’t even reached the standard phase where DHS will offer credit monitoring to all the victims, if they follow the same patterned response that all the other breaches do. That’s a year’s worth of credit monitoring for 1,000,000 citizens, all paid for by the taxpayers of Oklahoma.

Obviously, the State of Oklahoma is likely to agree with us now, that the cost of a stolen laptop  ($300,000 and set to rise very significantly) is worth $10 to protect it.

When will the next breach occur, and how many Oklahomans will it damage? I recommend protecting the whole fleet before that happens.