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.
