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SAIC Loses Data of 4.9 Million Patients
An anonymous reader writes "Government contractor SAIC just can't seem to get a break. Still fresh off of the Citytime scandal, they've now had a data breach in which backup tapes holding 4.9 million personal health records were stolen from an employee's car. To add insult to injury, evidently the tapes were not encrypted either: 'Tricare did not indicate whether SAIC encrypted the information on the stolen tapes, but Raley said, "It's very hard to encrypt a backup tape."'"
What's the probability that someone breaks into your car and steals computer tapes?
Maybe not as high as an employee selling the tapes and claiming that they were stolen.
Nail. Head. Hit.
"special hardware and software" gets me...
A LTO-5 drive and access to GNU tar or cpio is an alt-tab away for a number of IT people.
Well if it's a strictly Government program HIPAA isn't its regulatory framework. They'd still have a requirement to protect Personally Identifiable Information under FISMA act of 2002 and OMB Memorandum 06-16 which came out after the VA lost their records. Among other things M06-16 requires you to encrypt senstivie data on mobile media and data in transit.