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U.K.’s Databreach Challenges U.S. Data Stupidity Leadership

Written by Evan Schuman
November 22nd, 2007

Looks like the U.S. has lost its global leadership in data screwups, at least at the government level. (We still kick turkey butt in retail data breaches, thank you very much.) This is a result of U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s public apology Wednesday for the loss of computer disks containing personal and financial data on 25 million Britons.

The offense? According to a report in The Washington Post, “A government employee has told investigators that he downloaded the personal information, including bank account numbers, addresses and birth dates, put them on two disks and handed them to the courier service TNT on Oct. 18 for delivery to another government office. Though the information was password-protected, stronger security measures normally taken for such sensitive information were not applied — the information was not encrypted, and the package wasn’t sent by TNT’s registered service. The disks have not been seen since.”

Posted in IT Strategy/Industry, Security/Fraud
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