November 21st, 2007
U.K. Government Loses Data of 7.5 Million Families
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
The Child Benefit is a payment made British families with children under 16. It’s sort of like a tax rebate. Unfortunately for anyone receiving the Child Benefit, the government has managed to lose the data for all families receiving it, putting their addresses, personal info, and banking info at risk. Calling it a data breach does not do it justice.
The information was included on two discs and was only password protected and not encrypted, meaning it could be fairly easy to get at. The data includes names, dates of birth, bank account, and address details. The discs went missing from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) office.
HMRC Board member Dave Hartnett wrote an apology to all affected on the agency’s Web site. “I would like to offer my personal apologies for any worry or concern this data loss may cause you. And I can assure you that all efforts are being made to ensure that such a loss can never happen again,” he said. Source: BetaNews
We Say: The CDs were actually lost in inter-office mail, if you can believe that. 7.5 million families and 25 million people would be approximately 40% of the entire U.K. population. Heads should roll.
Roy Parvin says:
There are backups?
What has been missed is with the information on those disks it will now make it easier for the finder to buy a few houses, nice holiday, live like a lord at the expense of the people who names and details are on that disk. The government has just made ID theft … ID for free supplied by your friendly oops lost my laptop, disk, lost YOUR DATA governement.
November 22nd, 2007 at 2:29 am