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Reporters Find US Gov't Data In Ghana Market
narramissic writes "'Hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts,' were found on a hard drive purchased at a market in Ghana for the bargain basement price of $40, said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led an investigation into the global electronic waste business for the PBS show Frontline. The hard drive had belonged to US government contractor Northrop Grumman and in a made-for-TV ironic twist, 'some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices,' Klein said. 'Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe.'"
http://www.garner-products.com/PD-8400.htm
They should lose their contracts for failing to wipe the data off the hard drives.
They likely will as this is almost certainly a violation of ITAR regulations. Northrup Grumman does very little that is non-military.
They most certainly will not lose their contracts over this. They'll find a way to blame the lost data on some tiny sub-subcontractor that the subcontractor responsible for disposing of used equipment hired to wipe the drives, and they'll get fired. Or maybe they'll fire the person who kept the data on their hard drive instead of the network drive, and trot out the click-through policy that says "we told you we could fire you for violating this policy."
There's always a weasel-way for companies to get out of these situations by blaming someone for the failure.
John
Those "locks" do nothing to protect the data, and the drive still spins up when power is applied. You can even retrieve the password if you know what you're doing. Full drive encryption is a much better solution.