USA. California. In a puzzling breach of security, computer storage devices containing identification information of 800,000 Californians using the state's child support services have disappeared.
The Department of Child Support Services reported Thursday the data devices were lost March 12 en route to California from the Colorado facilities of IBM, one of the contractors in charge of the storage devices.
Authorities have begun to notify customers by mail about the incident, warning them that the devices include names, addresses, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, names of health insurance providers and employers.
There has been no evidence that the information has been misused, department officials said.
Still, the department is urging people affected to place a fraud alert on their credit cards, get copies of their credit reports with the three major U.S. credit reporting agencies, review any explanation of benefits statements they receive from health insurers, and "take other appropriate steps to monitor and protect their identities." Personal information is stored to process and enforce child support cases.
The department notified the three major U.S. credit reporting agencies, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion, as well as the California Attorney General's Office and the Office of Privacy Protection of the security breach.
Nikolai Fedotov, Chief Analyst at InfoWatch, comments: “There are numerous systems for hard disks and flash drives encryption available on the market. These include free yet fully-functional systems. But archiving systems are not yet very good.
For some strange reason, the majority of backup devices do not have built-in encryption. Nor do they have APIs to add your own encryption module. And yet, our statistics show that leaks from archive data carriers make up 8.5% of all incidents.
Why are the manufacturers of back-up systems so stubborn? Why not encrypt? Their childlike excuse that criminals supposedly do not understand the special archive format was laughable even 3-4 years ago. Today they still want to release such clumsy monsters onto the market.”
