Slashdot Mirror
In UK, 12M Taxpayers Lost With USB Stick
An anonymous reader tips a piece from the UK's Daily Mail that recounts another sad tale of the careless loss of massive amounts of private user data. "Ministers have been forced to order an emergency shutdown of a key Government computer system to protect millions of people's private details. The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park containing confidential passcodes to the online Government Gateway system, which covers everything from tax returns to parking tickets. An urgent investigation is now under way into how the stick, belonging to the company which runs the flagship system, came to be lost."
> This kind of careless attitude towards security wouldn't fly in the corporate world. It's only because it's the government doing it that security is so lax.
It was a private company, Atos Origin, which lost the data.
Check out the daily mail's front (web) page. If you can get past the bile, hate, bias, bitterness and sensationalism, ask youself: does this publication actually have any credibility?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Well I'm working for a corporation, and they forbid the use of USB gadgets for this precise reason - they don't want people copying & later losing the USB drives as they carry work to their homes. It's simply not worth the risk.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
We need a -dailymail option, currently I am having to use -notthebest, which isn't quite right. It does not adequately cover the feeling of anger and disappointment, nor the small amount of bile that leaps from my stomach to my mouth, at the sight of a Daily Mail article on the Slashdot homepage.
I know it's bad to regard an article as an utter fabrication, just because of where it originated. But in this case we must make an exception, because every other article the Daily Mail has ever printed has been a half-truth or outright lie.
FFS, this is the 'newspaper' that bitched about the number of Jews immigrating to Britain in the late 30's. They're not called the Daily Hate for no reason.
This sums up the Daily Mail, from the perspective of your average-Brit-with-a-clue. Seriously, please do not consider the Daily Mail as a reliable source, of anything. Ever.
Gordon Brown has made a frank admission that government cannot promise the safety of personal data entrusted by the public. The Prime Minister was speaking hours after it emerged that a memory stick containing the passwords to a government website used submit online tax returns had been lost.
Even more worrying considering government rhetoric on the £20bn ID cards they want:
From 2010, the government will target young people to get an identity card on a voluntary basis "to assist them in proving their identity as they start their independent life in society", with full roll-out to all British citizens starting from 2011. "The government are kidding themselves if they think ID cards for foreign nationals will protect against illegal immigration or terrorism - since they don't apply to those coming here for less than three months. "ID cards are an expensive white elephant that risk making us less - not more - safe. It is high time the government scrapped this ill-fated project." The Liberal Democrats said the cards' "fancy design" did not detract from the fact that they remained an intrusion into people's liberty. Chris Huhne, the party's home affairs spokesman, said: "It does not matter how fancy the design of ID cards is, they remain a grotesque intrusion on the liberty of the British people. "The government is using vulnerable members of our society, like foreign nationals who do not have the vote, as guinea pigs for a deeply unpopular and unworkable policy. When voting adults are forced to carry ID cards, this scheme will prove to be a laminated poll tax."
And from the government mouthpiece the BBC:
SNP Home Affairs spokesman Pete Wishart MP said his party had opposed ID cards from the outset but the government's "abysmal record on data protection" was reason enough to cancel them. He said the government looked "absurd" for pushing ahead with such a costly project. "These cards will not make our communities more secure, they will not reduce the terrorist threat and they will not make public services more efficient," said Mr Wishart. Phil Booth, head of the national No2ID campaign group, attacked the roll-out of the cards as a "softening-up exercise". "The Home Office is trying to salami slice the population to get this scheme going in any way they can," Mr Booth told the BBC. "Once they get some people to take the card it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. "The volume of foreign nationals involved is minuscule so it won't do anything to tackle illegal immigration."
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I used to work for Atos Origin (Although this was in the Netherlands, not the UK). In my experience, their insight into how security works is absolutely abysmal. When I worked there, it was no problem to reset someone else's password without their knowledge with a simple call to the help-desk.
At a later stage, they introduced a new 'lost-password' procedure for the intranet site which was positively retarded. In essence, when creating an account, you were required to enter three passwords. One of these was the actual password used to enter the site. When you had forgotten your password, you were then required to enter the other two passwords in order to reset the first one.
This was obviously intended as an implementation of the well-known "question-only-you-know-the-answer-to" challenge-response idea. The way it was done though (you had to enter both the 'answer' AND the 'question', and both were displayed as asterisks) rendered the whole system completely useless.
When I pointed this out to the helpdesk, they assured me the whole procedure was approved by very knowledgeable people, and very secure. Besides, there was absolutely no way for them to submit any problem reports to the developers responsible.
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.