Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Security Privacy

Medical Data on 365,000 Patients Stolen 226

Posted by CowboyNeal from the bandwidth-and-station-wagons dept.
Anonymous writes "Backup tapes and disks with data on 365,000 patients were stolen out of the car of a worker at a healthcare company in Portland. According to this Computerworld story, the tapes were in his car because he took them home as part of a disaster recovery plan, to protect the information from fire and other on-site disasters. D'oh!"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Medical Data on 365,000 Patients Stolen More

Medical Data on 365,000 Patients Stolen

Comments Filter:

  • What's the problem (Score:5, Funny)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:29PM (#14575679)
    They still have the originals, so they can make a new set of backups!

  • Well, the question is ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:29PM (#14575680)
    do they have a recovery plan for this disaster?

    • Re:Well, the question is ... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26, 2006 @11:36PM (#14576050)
      In Soviet Russia, you restore backups from originals!
    • I work for a healthcare organization in the same state as Providence (the number of them is pretty small so you could probably guess). Just last month we were reviewing policies to cover just this contingency.

      Washington law demands that notification occur if there's any chance that the information could be used criminally. Since we too operate in Washington, we're also complying with that law.

      Essentially you must notify each person directly unless the cost of doing so is upwards of a million dollars
      • I just had an doctors appointment at Providence in Portland a week ago... now I'm wondering how secure my data really is... mine wasn't stolen, as my appointment was after the 31st, but it makes me think twice...
      • It's resonable to expect that a lab that your hosp already has HIPPA agreements with would protect data that was received by accident to the same standard as data they were supposed to receive. My dental lab doesn't even care about patient data, we don't need it or really want it. We don't care as in don't need it rather than don't care as in don't protect it if we get it. When I out-source the lab we send to only gets a case number; that get's stolen it's no big deal
      • It sounds like if it wasn't the case, people would get notified all the time.

        I support a billing and collections office in the healthcare industry. I wouldn't say that this kind of mistake happens "all the time" but it is honestly an easy mistake to make. That's one of the reasons we have our fancy legal disclosure thought up by the company lawyers and plastered all over our cover sheets.

        Furthermore, I am led to believe that there would still be legal ramifications if the insurance company which receives
    • Don't tell anyone about it.
    • From TFA:
      "The tapes and disks were taken home by the employee as part of a backup protocol that sent them off-site to protect them against loss from fires or other disasters. That practice, which was only used by the home health care division of the hospital system, has since been stopped, said health system spokesman Gary Walker."

      This was part of the company's protocol? An employee taking the shit home and leaving it in his car? Personal/medical/financial data for umpteen hundreds of thousands of people? W

  • Hehe (Score:5, Funny)

    by Trip Ericson ( 864747 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:29PM (#14575681) Homepage
    "But we know the data's safe! We just have no idea where the hell it is."
    • At the ISP I used to work for, I always made it a habit to never stop anywhere or to talk to anyone on the walk to the bank. This helps ensure that you don't wind up with the "Its a Wonderful Life" accident and misplace $8000.

      Of course, it doesn't help when the bank that your manager has forced you to use has really poor security of their safety deposit box. Banks are unbelieveable. Unbelieveably stupid that is.
    • Security through obscurity at it's best.

      Note to any female that reads my files: I'm still waiting for confirmation that the itching sensation is actually crabs.

  • The further story (Score:5, Informative)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:30PM (#14575689) Homepage
    From TFA:

    The data on the tapes was encrypted, Walker said. The data on the disks was in a proprietary file format that was not encrypted, but "is stored in a way that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for someone to access it, then make any sense out of it," he said.

    So not as bad as the summary seemed to indicate, but still not the greatest thing to have happen.

    Especially if that proprietary file format "difficulty" is just the fact that the files are in some old version of Word. ;)

    • Re:The further story (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The only issue I've ever had with getting data off of a tape is finding a tape drive that will read whatever bizarre piece of crap the doctor used or was given by their vendor (I make part of my living reverse engineering doctors' older systems' data files to load into newer systems when they decide to change vendors). Once it's off the tape, you'll find that the vast majority of old applications out there (many run on old unixware servers) used tar to pack up a few datafiles, that are all fixed-width reco
    • Consulting in the insurance industry, I'd say that most likely the disks are from a mainframe since most medical companies are still using big mainframes for processing important customer data. I'm not sure how easy it is to read from a mainframe disc without having a mainframe, but it's hardly a proprietary format.

    • Much worse! Data really on disks! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Thursday January 26, 2006 @11:09PM (#14575911)
      It took me a minute to decypher that cyrptic comment, but look at these two parts from the article together:

      In an announcement yesterday, Providence Home Services, a division of Seattle-based Providence Health Systems, said the records and other data were on several disks and tapes stolen from the car of a Providence employee at his home. The incident was reported by the employee on Dec. 31, according to the health care system.
      The data on the tapes was encrypted, Walker said. The data on the disks was in a proprietary file format that was not encrypted, but "is stored in a way that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for someone to access it, then make any sense out of it," he said.

      So think about it - Tapes AND Disks were stolen (at first I had thought it was just tapes). The hard to read media (tapes) were encrypted. But it doesn't matter, chuck 'em in the river because the DISKS (fasr easier to read by any fool with a computer) have data that is in a format that is just "hard to read"!!

      Give me five minutes with Emacs and/or a Hex editor and/or Strings and I'll bet I could start churning SSN's out of the files right quick! I don't care if they are ISAM or DB2 or Pig-Latin! Security by file format obscurity is zero security, that data has to be treated as widely known at this point.
      • Depends on the keying structure. I work on an old MPE/iX machine that uses flat table crap (I'm babysitting the POS atm, in fact), and the difficulty would arise if the tables were keyed with third or fourth tables that weren't included in the backup, or were included on a different tape...This crap happens all the time, and generally you just have to "know" that those things are connected in that way. So you could end up with a SSN and a name, but no way to connect them.

        Or, depending, you could end up with
    • So not as bad as the summary seemed to indicate, but still not the greatest thing to have happen.
       
      Good point, I'm sure it will be just fine. On an unrelated subject, Daeley, just out of curiosity, how is that spastic colon of yours doing?
    • This must be some new meaning of the word encrypted that I was previously unaware of.

  • And that's why... (Score:5, Informative)

    by AltGrendel ( 175092 ) <`su.0tixe' `ta' `todhsals-ga'> on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:31PM (#14575695) Homepage
    ...you get an archive company that picks up the tapes and signs for them. You want a paper trail.

    Oh, and make sure the vault they keep them in is a)real and b) really able to withstand ANY disaster.

  • Next week... (Score:3, Funny)

    by FalconZero ( 607567 ) * <FalconZero@Gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:32PM (#14575701)
    ...on eBay.....

  • hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rwven ( 663186 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:32PM (#14575702)
    You've got to wonder why these people didn't have this stuff encrypted... An encrypted filesystem at least or straight up file encryption even... When are these companies going to get a clue?

    And storing the tapes in your car? What happens if it's 100 degrees outside?

    Where i work, they make the backup copies and have someone drive them to one of the other branches at the company. They make a backup every day and keep seven days worth of backup in rotation so if something went wrong 6 days ago and they backed up the problem every day, they ahve the 7th backup left to work with...

    Unfortunatley i don't know what their view on encrypting the data is. With as anal retentive as the IT VP is about security though, i can't imagine they wouldn't be encrypted...
    • correction: i see now that it was a "proprietary" file system. Part of me wonders if it's proprietary for their backup device provider and anyone could use that same software or device to get the data off. I find it hard to believe that a company would design their own filesystem for their backup tapes. I think they're downplaying how serious the screwup really is... Chances are someone could download the software or something to that effect and pull off all the data they want...

    • Re:hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)

      by OgreChow ( 206018 )
      I could be wrong, but I don't think there are a lot of 100 degree days in Portland.
      • Well certainly not this time of year. But in the summer it can be sunny enough that the inside of a car could probably get hot enough to damage tape. Haha maybe it was clear out that day and the "thief" was just trying to save the tapes.

    • It probably isn't encrypted. They probably think it's ok since it is only in transit for 20 minutes (or whatever it is).

      Of course, if the car is involved in an accident, the driver seriously injured and the tapes get stolen during or after the accident cleanup... ooops.

      This stuff happens every day. And it will continue to happen.

    • Unfortunatley i don't know what their view on encrypting the data is. With as anal retentive as the IT VP is about security though, i can't imagine they wouldn't be encrypted...

      Props to your IT VP. Being anal about security is his job.
      • i happen to agree. Yeah, it's annoying for everyone sometimes, but worth it if anyone were to attempt anything. I nmapped our network once and it basically got an "unhackable" rating... That was cool.
  • I mean, that has to be violating health care laws, the individual taking patient records home, even if they are in some propietary format. That can't be legal at all, due to patient confidentiality, ect. I hope something serious comes from this.

  • Hard to believe this mistake (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chowser ( 888973 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:37PM (#14575725)
    At my clinic where there is an EHR (Electronic Health Record) there is built in redundancy with multiple servers in different locations. It is hard to believe that a hospital system as big as Providence (which owns hospitals in multiple NW states) could have something as stupid as someone taking home a backup in their car.

  • Is it really theft? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:40PM (#14575743)
    The incident is the second data theft from a motor vehicle announced this week. Yesterday, Minneapolis-based financial services company Ameriprise Financial Inc. said it is notifying some 158,000 customers and 68,000 financial advisers that a laptop containing personal information about them -- including names, account numbers or Social Security numbers -- was stolen from a parked car late last month (see "Ameriprise notifying 226,000 customers, advisers of data theft").


    I can see hard disks being stolen..... but not tapes in the one case. Thieves like to take items with obvious value. Am I missing something here? Isn't it possible the workers simply sold the data?
    • If the worker had access to the data it would be much easier to make copies of them than to suffer the fallout of the tapes going 'missing'.
    • What are the tapes in? They're probably in a nicy shiny briefcase or other bag. Thieves love to steal bags and briefcases... it's fast to grab, it doesn't look odd when they walk down the street, and they can ditch it fairly easily afterwards.
    • I can see hard disks being stolen..... but not tapes in the one case. Thieves like to take items with obvious value.


      Maybe the thieves thought the tape cans contained pizzas.

      TFA says "backup data disks and tapes". I assumed the disks were CD (not hard or floppy). I guess the tapes would be cassettes, not reel-to-reel cans as I joked above.
    • Maybe, just maybe, the thief knew what he/she was doing?
      Consider:

      1. Tencho-savvy miscreant sees employee leave medical building carrying piles of disks and tapes. (the disks, if CDs could be mistaken for audio CDs, but the variety of backup tapes that I have seen used in recent years look more like 8-track casettes than DAT or old-school two-sided stereo audiocasettes)
      2. Techno-savvy miscreant ceases nearby dumpster-diving activities and stealthily zeroes in on the jackpot.
      3. ??????
      4. Profit!
  • Why couldnt he just scp the crap to his home computer and tape it there? Seems rather simple to me. Oh wait! maybe thats not secure enough....

  • OK (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 42Penguins ( 861511 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:41PM (#14575757)
    Cue the "bandwidth of a station wagon of backup tapes" cliches? If it's stuff they really don't want stolen, why not buy a safe for his car? Better yet, give him a company truck/van with secure storage. If they have 365,000 patients (customers) then they can surely afford to protect their information.
    • That's an awful big number for the number of patients getting home health and hospice from a hospital system that's just one of several competing in two piddly states. If there were 365,000, there must have been many in there more than once. Not to mention that many of the hospice patients are now metabolically different.

  • Thanks, buddy! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:41PM (#14575758)
    Now I don't have cancer anymore!

  • Partially encrypted (Score:5, Interesting)

    by krray ( 605395 ) * on Thursday January 26, 2006 @10:42PM (#14575764)
    At least the tapes were encrypted (not the disks in this incident). Even though this case doesn't affect me this was the first question that (always) pops in my head.

    For much the same reasons cited here our company backups are taken offsite (daily) -- only difference is that instead of tapes and disks we found that for speed, volume, and cost it was better to go with external hard drives (I figured this out almost ten years ago myself :).

    Even though we are a small organization (under a few hundred employees) the data is encrypted. That was step one and one of the most important IMHO. The average Joe who finds / steals any of our external drives (which has never happened thankfully) would be hard pressed to even figure out the filesystem (Ext3). Not that that would really slow down anybody who knows what they're doing -- nor was it done for security (I just like / trust Linux :).

    Of course I can think of other problem areas where data is flying around unencrypted and sensitive. The Department of Employment Security (which many states all report to for and through payroll to track dead beat dads) takes their data with your social security number in a plain ASCII text file sent through the US mail on a floppy. What happens when you lose a floppy, or what do they do with the processed disks?

    Fortunately and unfortunately we need and there will be laws requiring any such sensitive information to be encrypted for "National Security" (Big Brother [tm]) reasons. It's only a matter of time. It is unfortunate that it will take a law and more bureaucratic BS to make this happen, it is fortunate for all our privacy and the fact someone has to program this (more work for me :).
    • The average Joe who finds / steals any of our external drives (which has never happened thankfully) would be hard pressed to even figure out the filesystem (Ext3).

      Ahh... that explains why I couldn't mount those drives I just stole from you. Thanks for the tip!

      --Rob

  • Don't Use Your Car (Score:2, Interesting)

    by slashbob22 ( 918040 )
    For some reason this is seaming to be a popular activity. I remember hearing a few years back in school about a sysadmin bringing the tapes home for offsite backup. There actually was an incident where he needed to get information off the tapes. Each tape he tried was corrupted. After doing some investigation, it turned out that the magnetic field from his car's seat heater was corrupting them.
    Bottom Line: Secure transport and storage plans are required no matter how sensitive or mission critical your inf
  • What sane company in this day and age is moving such a small amount of data around on tapes? Suppose (liberally) an average of 100K of data on each of their 365,000 patients. That would fit ten times over on one hard disk. Furthermore the entire database could be sent over a T1 in

    100000 * 8 * 365000 / 1500000 / 60 / 60 / 24 == 2.2 days ... and daily diffs probably in a few minutes.

    I just think it's really funny how many people still feel like storage and bandwidth are so scarce. A patient database is nothi

  • I Live In Fear of This (Score:5, Interesting)

    by good soldier svejk ( 571730 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @11:01PM (#14575872)
    I also work at a healthcare provider adn deal with this exposure every day. Normal backups provides us no disaster recovery value because our recover point objective is measured in minutes. Tape simply can't meet it. Likewise if we were to attempt to restore the entire operation from tape it would take months. Just acquiring hardware would take weeks. But our recovery time objective is forty-eight hours. Basically, if we go longer than that we are out of business. So long term, our DR strategy is based on storage and app level replication between data centers. But as it stands, we only have one site. Consequently we send our backups offsite, essentially as a placebo. But it gets better. We don't have the drive resources to duplicate tape, so we send the originals offsite. That means that if we need to do a restore we must wait an hour for someone to retrieve the tape and reinject it into our library.

    Let's review here: we have a fake DR strategy which adds an hour to every file restore and exposes us to data theft. Sounds good huh? I have repeatedly told our brass it would be better to do nothing, but their position is "We don't want to tell the newspapers we had no DR strategy when the disaster strikes."

    How do we remediate this? Well, we could encrypt the tape but that is a big pain in the ass and has its own disadvantages. Really, the answer is to get off our ass and build a DR data center so the potentially deadly placebo goes away.
    • ... if we were to attempt to restore the entire operation from tape it would take months
      Just how much data are we talking about here? I can believe 48 hours would be a challenge but, with modern high speed tape drives, I cannot imagine how a restore could be measured in months (in an emergency, data could be restored in parallel also).
      • About thirteen terabytes. But the problem is not spooling up the tape. Remember, we are talking worst case scenario: total destruction of our data center. The problem is acquiring, building and integrating 200 servers plus storage, infrastructure, EDI etc. On the server side have three Windows admins and three unix/linux admins. We have two storage admins. They double as our backup admins, and one of them is also one of our three unix/linux admins.

        Like I said, just getting the servers, network and SAN har
    • Given HIPAA and SOX and alot of newer legislation, I would tell you to run, no - sprint, to your legal department. Sit out and talk to the legal beagles. Have them help you draft a risk acceptance letter and outlines everything you've put in this missive. Then go to the brass and make them sign it in triplicate. Give the brass one copy, give one copy to your personal lawyer and lock one in a safety deposit box somewhere. Depending on the circumstances, anything else might leave you open for a jail term.
      • To be fair, I have a medium term solution inthe pipe and there is budget for it. Rather than wait for the DR datacenter project to mature, we will pursue tape elimination and replicate the backup over the wire. Basically we are going to go with a content addressable disk backup target. Something like Data Domain. [datadomain.com] It still has no value from a DR perspective, but it eliminates the HIPAA exposure and restore latency. It alsogetsw us out of the tape management business (yay!). Basically we replace tape with CAS

      • Given HIPAA and SOX and alot of newer legislation, I would tell you to run, no - sprint, to your legal department. Sit out and talk to the legal beagles. Have them help you draft a risk acceptance letter and outlines everything you've put in this missive. Then go to the brass and make them sign it in triplicate. Give the brass one copy, give one copy to your personal lawyer and lock one in a safety deposit box somewhere. Depending on the circumstances, anything else might leave you open for a jail term. You

    • Consider yourself lucky. There's a bit of a chance that this story here may help you improve your situation -- at least it gives your boss something to think about.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Statecraftsman ( 718862 ) on Thursday January 26, 2006 @11:05PM (#14575889)
    Google's page count mysteriously jumps by 365,000 records. Coincidence? You decide.
  • ...butt plug can stop..

    a matter of the human factor and murphys laws...
  • I see lots of data theft / data loss. It seems that every month 100k+ people are affected when a company looses their personal information. I see these companies claim that they have no proof that the data is being used / read. I see these companies apologise for the loss and apologise for the inconvience and apologise for not keeping better track of customer data. I don't see the MASSIVE fines needed to get these companies to stop loosing our data.

    Until the cost of loosing data becomes greater than the c
  • I was screaming at my boss that we need to replace our tape drive. The backups were not restorable. Then I was fired and given compensation, which was good, I was about to quit. Six months later, a RAID crashed. My ex boss had to tell 300 persons: "All your work from five years is lost, sorry." Really sweat. People cheered when that guy was fired. They had a huge contingency plan, but they never validated a single backup. Never understimate the power of stupidity.
  • $20 says the worker is the one that "stole" the tapes. Who randomly walks up to a car and says "Oh look! Patent info! I'll take this home right away and start using my cryptography techniques to unlock it right away!"
    • I know people who have had their cars broken into only to have a CD player or a cheap $50 camera stolen.

      Hell my brother had it car broken into once. The window smashed by a chunk of concrete (it was still inside) and the only thing missing was his coat, sunglasses and a broken camera we were always too lazy to simply take out.

      • Hell my brother had it car broken into once. The window smashed by a chunk of concrete (it was still inside) and the only thing missing was his coat, sunglasses and a broken camera we were always too lazy to simply take out.

        I've had my car broken into several times. They always take the items that are easy for them to re-use or have street value. They may leave things with actual value. It's best to hide anything which could be sold for more than about $5.

  • What genius of a CIO thought an employee taking copies of tapes home in their car constituted a good disaster recovery plan? Especially in light of the flurry of highly publicized losses of customer information in recent months. My head is spinning just thinking about all the ways that a set of tapes in someone's car could be compromised.

    If this isn't a case where a C-level executive loses his/her job -- in a very public way -- for allowing such a boned-headed plan to be put in place then I don't know wh

  • Backup tapes and disks with data on 365,000 patients were stolen out of the car of a worker at a healthcare company in Portland.

    A company I used to work for in the wagering business used 9 track tapes (many states specify it in their laws, so we just used 'em everywhere). Not only are the channels not arranged to standard form, but the data itself is encrypted according to a variable password. The only clear block on the tape is the first, which gives you the sequence and index of the password. Then you h

  • My take... (Score:5, Informative)

    by hahn ( 101816 ) on Friday January 27, 2006 @01:14AM (#14576548) Homepage
    Well, finally a Slashdot post I can write about with some experience. FWIW, I'm a physician in Portland and medical informatics is an interest of mine.

    First of all, while it may shock many IT people that hospitals would use such rudimentary forms of backup and with little encryption, you have to understand that the state of IT in the medical world is backwards. Very backwards. There are a variety of reasons for this. One is that information systems are designed by IT people with little to no understanding of how the healthcare system works (which is understandable - many people in healthcare have little understanding of how it works). At the same time, you have healthcare professionals who really don't understand the full potential of how IT can be applied to healthcare or what its limitations are, but at the same time will complain about solutions that the IT world comes up with. There's this chasm between the two worlds and what you end up getting is a solution that no one likes and you end up having to go back to the drawing board over and over and over. It is absolutely amazing how much money gets sunk into medical IT and how very little progress it has made.

    Another reasons includes the vast amounts of red tape in the medical world that are MEANT to prevent lawsuits and provide the best quality healthcare. But there's so much that it what it really ends up doing is bringing any kind of progress or new idea to a grinding halt. There is no industry I can think of which is so ill adapted to making changes even when they're necessary or make sense. The legal world has the medical world frozen in fear of the next litigation. The result is a paradoxical decrease in healthcare quality and increased costs.

    Medical information privacy is one of those issues that seems to always be #1 on the list of concerns of electronic medical records. This has always been rather strange to me. How many people are really all that concerned with someone knowing about their cold, or their broken leg? Most people don't have much they would really care about hiding in their medical records. Of course, there are the people with mental illness, HIV, or sexually transmitted diseases. But even then, what exactly is this thief going to do with that information? IMHO medical information privacy is more of a theoretical concern than a real-life concern.

    And then of course, there's the REAL reason people are considered with medical information being digitized identity theft for money reasons. I really blame the credit card industry for this more than anyone else. It's surprising to me that they could simply issue a credit card if someone just writes down a name, social security number and address. In this day and age with inexpensive biometric security systems, one would think they could require a submission of a fingerprint (or two). Hell, nowadays with branch offices literally EVERYWHERE, they could simply request you come in with your driver's license. It seems to me that it would be in a bank's best financial interests to do something like this.

    Just my $0.02.
    • Being in the medical field too, with similar interests and background... I agree with everything you've stated. There's more a perception of the importance of medical records than reality. Most such records would require an "expert" to perform data mining. We should all be more concerned with identity theft based on information from other sources.

    • Re:My take... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by shilly ( 142940 ) on Friday January 27, 2006 @07:00AM (#14577534)
      I'm surprised you don't think there is any real risk attached to the leaking of medical records. The risks are real and there are documented instances of their occurrences of failures with severe consequences. These include the IRA penetrating the medical records system at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast to target police officers; a bank manager on the board of a US hospital finding out which of his customers had cancer and foreclosing the loans; and US insurers have disclosed health information about customers to lenders and employers without permission.

      Many people are vulnerable to blackmail about sensitive aspects of their medical records, including--but hardly limited to--sexual and mental health. Similarly, people may avoid seeking medical advice for such conditions if they fear that they cannot speak in confidence. And large networked databases simultaneously increase the value of the data to malicious users (more chance of finding something interesting) and the opportunities for access.

      Of course, the major threats are all internal, not external -- malicious insiders.
    • I have consulted at many health care businesses (hospitals, retirement) and what they did, by allowing an employee to actually take the items out of the building, is a blatant HIPPA violation. All data needs to be encrypted before being moved off-site, and no employee should be allowed to ever take patient information out of the building.

      In this case, it is just a stupid provider. I agree that there is a whole lot of red tape in health care, but what they did are the two first things you learn when you go
  • RTFA, the disks weren't encrypted. They can just grab all the personal data they want off of the disks. They are relying on security by obscurity because they say its a proprietary format. Any format someone can make, someone else can make something to read it. How hard is it to search for SSN in a data file?

    And even better, what if the plain text on the disks is also on the tapes? Since you have the plain text original, you can easily decrypt the final encrypted version.

    They are just trying to make it soun
  • You use a private car for such a delivery?
    You use your own basement as a "disaster recovery" site?
    These sounds more like an excuse for some other dirty thing, like data loss, to be covered up.
    And, of course, we all suppose that those backups have been recorded with strong cryptography, right?
    In any case it seems that the major threat to information security is humanity.
  • Backup tapes and disks with data on 365,000 patients were stolen out of the car of a worker at a healthcare company in Portland.

    Ironically, several Britney Spears, Backstreet Boyz and N*SYNC cds were still found in the back seat, unharmed.
  • he took them home as part of a disaster recovery plan

    In my country in the middle of Europe, that itself would be a crime. No one could possess any personal data (including making copies of personal documents) the law does not say explicitly he can. 8 years in prison.
  • The procedure should have been to go directly from the data center to a bank - and deposit the backups in a safe deposit box. The data should never make a pit-stop in someone's driveway. :(

    Unless you get attacked on the way to the bank (and if you think that likely, take steps to provide security for the transfer - maybe an armored car if it is that sensitive), there shouldn't be an opportunity for anyone to gain access to the data. Usually keeping a low profile, and varying the times and days you make th
  • So... the data was obviously encrypted, right? AFAIC that should be standard operating procedure with offsite backups of sensitive data.
  • In many places social security numbers are used as medical ids. I noticed this while visiting many doctors after an auto accident in 2003, even though my health insurance card no longer uses socials (switch due to a California law). I dont know how they got my social, but they had it. I just cross my fingers and watch my financial records.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Confound these ancestors.... They've stolen our best ideas!" - Ben Jonson

Close