Heads up, you vets... and maybe even active duty folks, too. From DarkReading, via a tweet from cyberwar:
A defective hard drive containing the personal information of some 70 million U.S. military personnel was returned to a contractor for repair and recycling -- without being erased first, according to a news report.
According to a report in Wired.com, the inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration is investigating a potential data breach of a hard drive that helped power eVetRecs, the system veterans use to request copies of their health records and discharge papers.
When the drive failed last November, the agency returned the drive to the contractor, GMRI, which sold it to them, for repair. GMRI determined it couldn't be fixed, and ultimately passed it to another firm to be recycled. But Hank Bellomy, a NARA IT manager who reported the incident to the inspector general, told Wired.com that the drive was not properly erased.
"This is the single largest release of personally identifiable information by the government ever," Bellomy told Wired.com. "When the USDA did the same thing, they provided credit monitoring for all their employees. We leaked 70 million records, and no one has heard a word of it."As if I didn't have enough to worry about...
NARA says the lost drive is not a problem because its contractors signed privacy promises in their contracts. A spokesperson told Wired.com that the agency "does not believe that a breach of PII occurred," according to the report.
The drive was part of a RAID array of six drives containing an Oracle database that held detailed records on 76 million veterans, including millions of Social Security numbers dating to 1972, the report says.
Bellomy told Wired.com that when the unencrypted drive failed, he tried to subvert the longstanding recycling policy by hiding the drive in his safe. But it was taken out of his control when he was put on long-term leave, he said. He also said that more drives failed after the November incident, and that he performed a forensic scan on them to prove they were full of sensitive data.
Looks like someone at GMRI is going to be helping to nudge up the Obama unemployment rate by a nose. Everyone who's been in the system since the Munich Olympics has to worry.
ReplyDeleteIn my previous gig I was the "connecting rod" between the division that met the NARA regs and the division that met the DIACAP auditing requirements, so I was consulted whenever people needed to navigate that tightrope between getting in trouble for keeping things, and getting in trouble for throwing things away. Rather interesting it happened with NARA. This Bellomy guy seems to be working for the agency itself rather than a contractor, and it seems the best remedy he had at the time was to "subvert the longstanding recycling policy by hiding the drive in his safe."
To meet the letter and intent of both the data retention rules and the confidentiality rules, along with security & privacy of HIPAA, is no casual balancing act. The apparent contradictions have to be hashed out in the agency/contractor policy, and to the best degree I can make out from the way the story is written, it appears this was not done somewhere.
NARA stands out in my memory for some kind of superlative grade they got from FISMA; I'm thinking they either had one of the best grades for computer security, or one of the worst. The GoogleGodz are not smiling on my efforts to refresh my memory and I really don't have time to do a decent job of it at the moment, but I did find this report which has some items of color and interest...and not in a good way.
Bottom line? I'm thinking these folks have some work to do. There is the issue with their central focus as the nation's records archiving agency, which is somewhat at odds with computer security and the necessity of getting rid of stuff where it doesn't belong. It requires special attention. But there is also the other issue with regard to their historical success...or lack thereof.
All points well taken, Morgan. I'm not exactly sure how one would wipe a malfunctioning disk prior to returning it to the manufacturer for service, but this can't be TOO big of a problem, no?
ReplyDeleteAs for your linked report... Jeeze. Those guys need to hire a tech writer... or someone who can string words together into complete sentences. How frickin' painful that was to read... (scan, actually. I HATE bad language.)
Remember the paper world we used to live in when we carried all our personal financial info, etc., from base to base on paperwork rolled up in cardboard tubes pre-comuterization? LOL. Lots of security THAT way.
ReplyDeleteVirgil: Oh, yeah... I DO remember that! And we were instructed to NEVER open that tube, under pain of death or worse, IIRC. So what's the FIRST thing I did with it when I got home? Heh.
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