Venyu Blog

Some folks (and the organizations they represent) just never learn.  On the heels of the 20-year sentencing of hacker Albert Gonzalez in March for the massive TJX breach, in what is being called the largest data breach ever in its industry, Educational Credit Management Corp (ECMC) – a federal loan guarantor – has reported that data on 3.3 million borrowers has been stolen from a portable media device.  (In comparison, in November 2009, managed healthcare provider Health Net announced that it had lost a hard drive that contained seven years of patient data including Social Security numbers and medical records of more than a million Health Net customers).

According to ECMC the stolen device contained the names, addresses, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of borrowers. While the company did not say whether the data on the portable drive had been encrypted, no bank account or other financial account information was included in the stolen data. But hey, the company did announce that it’s partnered with Experian, a credit protection agency, to “provide affected individuals with credit monitoring and protection services at no charge.” You’ll pardon my cynicism on that but isn’t that kind of like closing the proverbial barn doors once the horses have already gone missing?

Let’s face facts. Portable media is not secure media. Even if the data recorded on to it is encrypted it’s still not worth the risk of jeopardizing the financial and legal futures of a single individual, much less 3.3 million of them. There are proven and reliable alternatives to portable media that reduce your company’s data to the risks of exposure and theft –not a single one of them, incidentally, that recommends keeping that data in an easily hijacked, transportable form factor. Given the events surrounding ECMC it should be clear that it’s just not worth it.  Read more here.

And because the ECMC theft isn’t exactly unprecedented, for an eye-opening gallery of ten high profile data thefts –many of them involving the loss of backup tapes, some encrypted and some not, Network World has assembled a slideshow its christened “10 Woeful Tales of Data Gone Missing” which you can find here.