One more significant data loss took place in Japan—this time several Kanagawa prefectural senior high schools in Yokogama were hit by the insiders.
Discredited data contained personal information about education payment invoices of 110 thousand students. By the most probable version of the incident personal data of several dozens thousands students got in Winny file-exchange network as a result of carelessness of one of prefectural workers.
The leak was announced in the beginning of last fall, when Japanese prefectural administration of education received a fax, informing about the downloaded personal students’ data in file-exchange network. 2000 confidential records were found in Winny network as a result of investigation in November 2008 which proved the information about the incident. The last attempt of search in the beginning of January showed that total number of victims exceeded a point of 100 thousands people, i.e. the scale of leak has grown 55 times bigger, than the initially announced amount.
The direction of schools considers IBM Japan, which has developed education payment system, guilty in the leak. IBM Japan says all the claims should be addressed to a third party company that also took part in the project. However, the name of this company and its contribution to the project are kept in secret. IBM Japan claims the problem was caused by actions of certain viruses from one of third party’s workstations, were Winny client was installed.
Today prefectural schools are concerned with the removal of downloaded personal students’ data from file-exchange network. As it appeared, it is not that easy from legal point of view in Japan because only legal entities are protected by the law on protection of personal data, private users of file-exchange networks are out of legal protection. Besides there is no guarantees that data lost in the leak is not beyond the bounds of network and that it will not be misused by fraudsters in the future.
All the students—victims of fhe incident—were notified about the leak via email and were recommended to open a new bank account.
Source: http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200901100069.html