Slashdot Mirror
Unencrypted Lost Tape Affects 230 Retailers
Lucas123 tells us that a backup tape lost by Iron Mountain reportedly contains credit card information from 650,000 customers. The unencrypted tape also holds Social Security numbers for 150,000 customers. Quoting the Computerworld Article:
"Although J.C. Penney was the only company that Jones would confirm as affected by the missing tape, that retailer accounts for just a small percentage of all accounts that were compromised. In total, 230 retailers are affected by the breach. 'Clearly that number includes many of the national retail organizations,' he said."
This is one of the many reasons we're moving to a VTL. I might just use this incident as a little nudge to speed up the implementation.
So, one of those Egg Council creeps got to you too, huh?
If companies want to store customers credit card numbers and social security numbers for years on their systems, could they at least use common sense? The backup tape should have at least been encrypted, and should have been behind lock and key.
This is the firm known as Iron Monkey by the network staff at two *huge* firms yet management keep giving them the contract, probably because they're cheap (pay peanuts, etc). After the volume of behind-the-scenes tales I've heard about these idiots I wouldn't trust them with a crayon.
So what's so hard about implementing encryption? Seriously. It's easy to implement and use and it can put MANY minds at easy knowing that recovery of the data is virtually impossible. I still think the UK is on the right track with the law punishing the company owners when something goes awry and they lose their tapes. Chairman would suddenly take note of yet another way the could get fired, and I'm sure they'd take steps to keep their job.
Honestly, how long until someone realizes the current system is broken? We can't hope to keep our Social Security numbers secret indefinitely. We have everything in your life tied to this one, unchangeable number. The credit system needs to be overhauled so that it doesn't matter if you have my name, address, SS# and mother's maiden name. Just off the top of my head, how about a challenge-response system. In a secure manner, I set a secret password. For more security, you could even set single-use passwords. When I go out to get credit, I tell someone on the phone my password. Someone else goes out and tries to get credit without my password and they get arrested. It's not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than what we have now. And it took me 5 minutes to think that up. I bet someone with 6 weeks and half a million dollars could come up with an even better way.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
The problem with encryption is that the news agencies still don't report it to make people feel that bit safer.
When one of our high-street banks in the UK lost details of quite a large number of customers' details then none of the major news agencies I saw reported that it was encrypted. It was all "bank loses details", "customers at risk", "think of the bank details (and children)!". It took a bit of digging to find out that company policy was that hard disks were encrypted and that this one apparently was as well.
Okay, so I'm British and don't know how the American system works (only visited once) but social security numbers? What were people buying such that they were customers on this tape and had their SS# recorded? As close as we get is our National Insurance number (for benefits and pension contributions) and I've never known of anyone other than an employer who needs to know it.
Wait until the US Feds cram RealID down our throats. Roosevelt was warned of the dangers of a single national ID number; which he and his supporters dismissed. It only took 65-70 years for technology to catch up to this particular nightmare.
Well, it is simply a typical American fsckup. People get issued this one simple guessable number, for life, and everything uses it. Without this number, a USAsian almost doesn't exist. Since illegal immigrants don't have a SSN, the police have a hard time identifying tens of millions of them, since they just don't know how.
It is almost trivial to hijack someone else's identity and obtain credit cards using that number. More enterprising thieves will sell someone else's house after a few minutes of research at the local land titles offices.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Why the hell don't people get put in prison when this happens? Ridiculous.
There answer is: it's not hard at all. If we can assume GE Money is using Oracle, it has had TDE (transparent data encryption) since 10g. All they have to do is alter a column, setting the 'encrypt' option, and suddenly its contents are stored on disk as encrypted. No application changes are required*, because Oracle unencrypts the data transparently as it is read from disk.
In this case, the stolen tape would include lots of plaintext data, but the sensitive data would be unintelligible. The only way to read the sensitive data is to retrieve the backup of the Oracle wallet also.
* as long as the encrypted columns do not require a range scan of an index (which obviously wouldn't work), but when are you range-scanning a credit card number or SSN?
After two CD's containing 15 million bits of info went missing, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7104115.stm/ I had a drink with a couple of my friends and had a chat about the loss.
They didn't know about the password protection, but they knew the data wasn't encrypted.
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
I assume each installation of Oracle will have its own encryption method. It would be silly if I could transfer the encrypted data from system A into system B.
I am an Oracle ignoramus.
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
Same method, but the keys would be different. You'd have to get your hands on the keys in the Oracle wallet, which is in a file outside the database and should be backed up separately.
That's the Government losing data on CDs posted internally, though, not a high street bank having a laptop stolen. You're less likely to encrypt internally posted media than you are the disk of a device that has "steal me!" written all over it.
in business can reduce profits. Guess which wins?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"Hey, I've just had an idea. Why are we paying for two separate backups which get handled in two different ways? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to just consolidate everything onto one backup solution and save a bunch of money?"
Am I the only one who read the headline and hoped that there was more new eps of Lost despite the writer strike?
http://usa.visa.com/merchants/risk_management/cisp_payment_applications.html/
This is why PAPB "payment application best practices" from Visa should be mandated across the board. It ensures that all sensitive data (Primary account numbers, PINs, etc.) and other user sensitive information is not stored on the system, unless it is encrypted. This could go a long way to saving us alot of headaches!
I'm sure John Cleese can come up with a good excuse for this mishap. See the advert he did for them
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
JC Penny and other retailers probably stored the SSNs when their customers signed up for a branded credit card.
Is saving 10% on a few hundred dollar purchase really worth your financial identity?
Encryption is hard, because key management is hard. Instead of sending one file, you have to send two, through totally different channels.
Well, "have to" is relative. A huge amount of the time you see "encryption", the decryption key is right there next to it. But, you see, the data is encrypted. So it's safe.
*sighs*
One reason I've heard for not doing it, from more than one sysadmin over the years, is that encrypted data is more susceptible to errors. In other words it's unreliable, not too hard to do. A couple of bad blocks on an unencrypted tape may lose you a file or two, but could render an encrypted tape unreadable. How true this is I have no idea, I'm a coder not a sysadmin, but it strikes me that encrypting individual files rather than entire tapes would solve this problem (though it would leak some information about file sizes etc.).
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
If I'm not mistaken, the amount of data that can be lost to a single corrupted bit with two-way encryption depends on the block size. But a well defined checksum over the encrypted data ensures that some of that data can be recovered, and redundant storage can help this issue further.
But even in the worst case, the cost of losing tons of business and tons of money in lawsuit settlements due to your customers' personal information being compromised far outweighs the cost of the same data being obliterated completely. There is no reason not to encrypt, and smart sysadmins know this.
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
I thought this was a story about a secret episode of Lost. Damn you Abrams and your viral marketing.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
(I'm dual-national, which makes things easier for me. I work in the US because the UK has been totally incompetent in the IT arena for many decades now and the pay is pathetic. The usual brain-drain reasons. I do not consider America to have any credible notion of privacy, security or welfare, but realism has to apply. Those three don't pay bills.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Iron Mountain is possibly the most antiquated, ass-backwards, idiotic, incompetent company on the planet. In 2006, they were quite excited because they were about to move away from a program that ran on DOS 3.3, and required hand-entry of tape and company IDs...THREE TIMES per tape! They can get away with this because they're the only game in town.
They should be held responsible for ten times the amount of credit card fraud that they could possibly be implicated in over the past two years. That should be enough to bankrupt them.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Yet, to the best of my knowledge, most information theft happens internally.
It's a lot easier to keep quiet though.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?