Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Major UK Gov't Data loss
From: David Farber <dfarber () cs cmu edu>
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:13:54 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Ross Stapleton-Gray <ross () stapleton-gray com> Date: November 21, 2007 12:40:51 PM EST To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com Subject: Re: [IP] Major UK Gov't Data loss At 12:34 AM 11/21/2007, Paul Davey wrote:
Apparently the UK tax office has lost two disks (CD/DVD?) of 25 million "Child Benefit" users - names, DOBs and for many families bank account details. In short the works. (Out of a UK population of ~60 million this is pretty impressive.) ... Seems to be yet another combination failure of legacy systems, human error in not following procedure(s) and some bad luck.
But if nothing at all had gone wrong, it's still the case that some collection of individuals had and have ready access to 25M records useful for identity theft, namely staff at the UK tax office. If you're staring into a meager future pension, in a world where inflation is going to devour your standard of living, that might look like a rather attractive "retirement benefit." We're worried about two lost disks (or discs, I suppose, in the local parlance)... why shouldn't we worry about N copies of those, readily made and eminently portable?
We ought to ensure that information that's easy to get is less useful than it apparently is (e.g., masking things like SSNs) and making it more in the interest of banks and credit card companies to prevent identity theft.
Ross ---- Ross Stapleton-Gray, Ph.D. Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc. http://www.stapleton-gray.com http://www.sortingdoor.com ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Major UK Gov't Data loss David Farber (Nov 21)
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- Re: Major UK Gov't Data loss David Farber (Nov 21)