Archive for January, 2010
Rip of the Week: Al Gore’s Daughter, and 250,000 Others, Breached by National Archives
A quarter-million people were put at risk by the National Archives and Record Administration, when an unencrypted hard drive “disappeared” nearly a year ago.
Fox News reports on the RollCall.com article (thanks to lyger for the tip). Apparently, the hard drive had been sent to NARA during the Clinton administration and contained Personally Identifying Information (PII), [...]
The $31 Million Laptop
The Ponemon Institute, with sponsorship from PGP, has released their “Fifth Annual U.S. Cost of Data Breach Study.” As usual, the report is a treasure trove of great data (just like most people’s laptops are).
The average cost per breached data record rose $2 in 2009, to $204. That’s actually not too bad. The average cost [...]
Tip of the Week: Build a Disaster Recovery Plan, Part Two
Continuing the disaster recovery theme, it’s time to think about automation. I confess that, actually, I already blogged about this. But it fits in our theme here. Automation really is king. There are very, very few instances where relying on manual effort results in anything but a big mess come recovery time–steps weren’t performed on [...]
Rip of the Week: Thief Steals Safe Containing “Thousands” of SSNs from Goodwill
So much for charity and goodwill. A particularly vicious thief broke into a Goodwill location in Michigan and made off with a safe. The problem was, instead of a safe full of cash, he got a safe full of backup tapes containing Personally Identifying Information, including names, birth dates, and Social Security Numbers, of thousands [...]
Tip of the Week: Build a Disaster Recovery Plan, Part One
I’ve previously blogged a bit about data backup, but the topic is worth a bit of a closer look. In the context of disaster recovery, it’s also important to mention that there’s more to it than just data backup and recovery.
For starters, though, consider how much your business relies on its data. Chances are, you [...]
Rip of the Week: 15,000 Kaiser Patients Breached by Unencrypted External Drive
This week’s Rip is another episode of the “unencrypted external hard drive” show. Thanks to lyger over at DataLossDB for the heads up. The Fresno Bee reports that an external hard drive was stolen, containing names, medical record numbers, and for some patients, ages, dates of birth, gender, phone numbers and other information related to [...]
Tip of the Week: Use a Third-Party Security Auditor
For businesses seeking to maintain a decent level of data security (said businesses being rare these days), an obvious first step is to keep your head pulled out of the sand. It is very common for upper management, and even mid- or lower-management, to essentially stick the head in the sand, and try to ignore [...]
Rip of the Week: MoD Laptop Stolen…and Encryption Key Too
Here’s an interesting case out of the UK. Thanks go to Redemtech for the alert. The BBC reports that a Ministry of Defence laptop was stolen last November. But in an interesting twist, the encryption (decryption) key was stolen along with it.
All this in the context of the MoD confession back in July that 658 [...]
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