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Thursday, August 21, 2008

Oops! Another 10,000 plus records lost.

The BBC are reporting that Home Office contractor PA Consulting have lost a computer memory stick containing personal details about tens of thousands of criminals. The lost data apparently includes details about 10,000 prolific offenders as well as information on all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales.

This loss is the latest in a whole string of incidents involving misplaced data, including:
I feel like I am repeating myself but really, how can the government expect support for any proposal such as ID cards, which involves a massive database after all this clumsiness?

Update: Blairwatch reminds us that PA Consulting, who are responsible for this latest data loss, were appointed by David Blunkett to prepare the ID card scheme in the first place.

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Comments:
I really don't understand how this kind of thing can happen. Don't the government departments have remote access servers? Why, in this day and age does information need to be stored on CD's, DVD's or USB memory sticks?

There should never be any need for information to ever leave the servers.
 
I think this is the tip of the iceberg as well.. call me anachronistic if you please but there
is something in bringing the old filing cabinets back into fashion, files on recycled paper of course.
This ludditic maxim will never come about so we can probably expect more of this in the future.
Probably this memory stick has been chucked out with the rubbish and our forebears will dig it up as archaeology in 3000 years time so it willnay matter about our NI numbers then because we will be just bones.
 
have you got time for a short meme for the beautiful lady in marble?
 
I agree with anon: there is no reason for information to be stored on portable formats. The thing is, people are so paranoid about horror stories in the media about "hackers" that they don't trust networks, so we end up with the... idiotic.. situation that data is stored on usb sticks and carried around, burned on cdr and posted via Royal Mail, stored on laptops which are just left around. Come on people: trust the networks. You need to get out of this 1980s "floppy disk" mentality. And network admins: you need to do more to ensure your users actually use and trust the network.

Personally, if I was in charge, I would fire anyone who removed data via an unsecured portable method. Instantly. No Excuses.
 
Regarding Rhetoric Innes comments, you could actually imagine that this will be an important find; some geneologist centuries from now will find this information and transcribe it onto Ancestry-dot-Com.

Great, Great, Great grandfather was a PPO - but what's a PPO?
 
See on the news this evening that the personal records of quite a number of RBS customers has ended up on a £30 server on eBay.

I'm sure that the media highlighting these breaches hasn't gone un-noticed by the criminal fraternity.
 
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