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Privacy Security Government United States

FEMA Data Breach Hits 2.5 Million Disaster Survivors (cnn.com) 16

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) unlawfully shared the private information of 2.3 million hurricane and wildfire survivors with a federal contractor that was helping them find temporary housing, an inspector general from the Department of Homeland Security said Friday. The data includes "20 unnecessary data fields" such as "electronic funds transfer number," "bank transit number" and addresses. CNN reports: FEMA said it began filtering the data in December 2018 to prevent this information from being shared, but a more permanent fix may not be finalized until June 2020. "Since discovery of this issue, FEMA has taken aggressive measures to correct this error. FEMA is no longer sharing unnecessary data with the contractor and has conducted a detailed review of the contractor's information system," said Lizzie Litzow, press secretary for FEMA, in a statement.

"To date, FEMA has found no indicators to suggest survivor data has been compromised. FEMA has also worked with the contractor to remove the unnecessary data from the system and updated its contract to ensure compliance with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cybersecurity and information-sharing standards. As an added measure, FEMA instructed contracted staff to complete additional DHS privacy training."

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FEMA Data Breach Hits 2.5 Million Disaster Survivors

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  • and we are here to help.
    Extra data fields help the gov help you more.
    Want some more free gov help?
    Fill in all that data to get the free help.
  • Technologically, it's such a simple solution. You create something like a limited database view, you expose it on an API, and you give API keys to the people you want to be able to query it.

    This is trivial technology to us, but to the people actually doing the work, the more likely scenario is that one person gives another a USB key with a giant Excel spreadsheet containing all the details of every person involved.

    Why is it so hard for us to communicate to them that we know how to effect communication in wa

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