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British MoD Stunned By Massive Data Loss
Master of Transhuman writes "Seems like nobody can keep their data under wraps these days. On the heels of the World Bank piece about massive penetrations of their servers, the British Ministry of Defense has lost a hard drive with the personal details of 100,000 serving personnel in the British armed forces, and perhaps another 600,000 applicants. This comes on the heels of the MoD losing 658 of its laptops over the past four years and 26 flash drives holding confidential information. Apparently the MoD outsources this stuff to EDS, which is under fire for not being able to confirm that the data was or was not encrypted."
I can confirm that the data was or was not encrypted.
Fleur de Sel
this is the reason why the brits have to spy more....'cuz it's about quantity.....if u have more data coming in.....than that is going out (aka losing)...then u'r golden.
(I don't think it's a coincidence that this was posted after the bit about the brits needing to spy more)
Information wants to be free.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Great job, way to piss on our parade of mocking government incompetence. I hope you're happy with yourself.
(Please don't audit me!)
or they're just moving to a more distributed data system, they want to spy on you so they can see the data you now hold. Its like a bittorrent data-storage solution, all these 'lost' laptops and pendrives is a secret mechanism of distributing the data in the most widely and random way - thus adding to the security of the overall system, as no-one else knows where its ended up.
See, its simple really :-)
It's the same the world over, the only part of government that does it's job well is the one the citizens wish would fail miserably.
Seriously, the IRS, or HMRC here in the UK, would track down Osama bin laden if owed them a penny. Unfortunately, it seems he must file his tax returns on time...
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Larry Wall wouldn't.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
How is it a questionable practice? Fires may not be very likely, and the servers are on the first floor (second in American terms) so we're not likely to have problems in a flood, but it's always better safe than sorry.
What would you do personally if you had ~250GB of data from various servers that needed to be regularly backed up? Would you still backup to tape but then just store them in a fireproof safe onsite? That should protect the tapes from most disasters, but you just never know, do you? We regularly have large cranes in the yard - if one of them were to topple or swing a heavy 20 foot container through the server room wall or something crazy like that, it could do some serious damage.
I think what the GP was saying was, I wouldn't want the liability associated with taking the tapes home myself. I mean, what if somebody did break into my car, or whatever? What if I got in an accident on my way home, and the tapes were destroyed? If there's any problem, I don't want to take them blame.
That's why I would pay somebody else to take care of it for me. Fortunately, it turns out that there's a company called EDS that offers just such a service! They do this kind of thing for plenty of other companies/government agencies, so I'm sure they're as reliable as anyone, and the important thing is, if there's a problem, I'm off the hook.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;