Arizona's Department of Economic Security is notifying the families of 40,000 children that their personal data may have been compromised following the theft of several hard drives from a commercial storage facility. The information lost includes social security numbers, addresses, names and phone numbers. The data on the disk was password protected but not encrypted; knowing state employees it is 1234 for a password. The disks were stolen from a leased extra space storage facility.
But here is the best part of this, the employees did everything right. The agency rules say that sensitive data should be backed up this way and moved to an offsite facility for storage. The password protection was within the rules, but no encryption was needed. So the question I would ask would be who is the idiot in that administration who is writing the rules? Could it be person counting down to a pension and surfing the web all day? Maybe, smoking cigarettes and taking breaks all day? Maybe, someone who has never heard of full disk encryption?
This goes back to what I have said time and time again, no matter how many people we talk to in state, federal or county offices, they always know more than us. This is why I am never going to run out of things to write about, I will always have people who know more than me, make huge mistakes like this, keep their jobs and also get a nice pension. God bless America.
Larry Chaffin Ph.D is the Chief Executive Officer/Chairman and founder of Pluto Networks, a Consulting and VAR partner specializing in WAN Acceleration, VoIP, WLAN, Telepresence and Security and a Riverbed reseller. Pluto Networks specializes in the needs of small, large and enterprise companies by always giving them a great ROI on the products they sell. Pluto Networks has a presence in 23 countries around the world enabling all of its consultants to be virtual. Larry was a Judge at Interop for the Best of Interop Awards for 2009 and is looking forward to the 2010 awards in Las Vegas.
Larry has also co-authored all of the books listed below:
Managing Cisco Secure Networks, Skype Me, Practical VOIP Security, Configuring Check Point NGX VPN-1/Firewall-1,Configuring Juniper Networks NetScreen & SSG Firewalls,Essential Computer Security: Everyone's Guide to Email, Internet, and Wireless Security, How to Cheat at Microsoft Vista Administration, Microsoft Vista for IT Security Professionals, Asterisk Hacking, 2008 VoIP and Video Conferencing, Infosecurity 2008 Threat Analysis and author of Building a VOIP Network with Nortel's MS5100, along with co-authoring/ghost writing eleven other technology books for VIOP, WLAN, security and optical technologies. Larry is currently working on a follow up to Building a VoIP network with Nortel's MCS 5100 Book as well as new books on Cisco Telepresence Networks, Practical VoIP case studies and WAN Acceleration with Riverbed.
Larry also has more than 29 vendor certifications and has been working on many others. Larry has been a principal architect around the world in 22 countries for many Fortune 100 companies designing VoIP, security, wireless and optical networks. He has expanded over time also to include application acceleration. Larry is working with worldwide company now out of Asia as a Special Assistant to the CEO and CIO as they go through organizational and network changes, helping them with strategic advice from his years or experience. Pluto Networks is a channel partner of Cisco, ProCurve, LifeSize, Riverbed, Call Copy, Fastsoft and Symantec.
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