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Posts Tagged ‘Military’

Laptop Ghost strikes at Oregon National Guard

June 22nd, 2010

A laptop which belonged to the Oregon National Guard member was stolen earlier this week forcing the military to contact all the members who might be impacted by this incident.

As per the details by the Oregon National Guard, the laptop was stolen a couple of days ago on 21st of June from a vehicle. Apparently, the laptop was being used by the guard member to do work from home.

Captain Stephen Bomar, Chief of Public Affairs for the Oregon National Guard, said in a news release, “Although this laptop is password protected, with potential exposure of individual personal information, we are doing everything possible to notify individuals about the theft” .

The Oregon National Guard and The National Guard Bureau are individually contacting service members whose sensitive information may be compromised. Legal services are also available in the event a service member needs it through the Oregon National Guard Office of the Staff Judge Advocate.

Once again the incident raises serious eyebrows about the methods adopted by large organizations to secure data, store data and encrypt sensitive and critical information.

The laptop theft incident is not new as earlier in April this year, burglars had attacked the home of Jerome Avery stealing a laptop from his house.

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While huge sums are spent on protecting internal networks from hackers, employees are walking out the front door with laptops that not only have vast quantities of data stored on them, but also have applications connecting to internal networks and protected websites.

80% of information theft results from lost or stolen equipment. 50% of network intrusions take place using credentials from lost or stolen equipment. With laptop encryption installed, none of the information or credentials would have been lost.

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Posted in Encryption, laptop theft

Tags: Government Military National Guard Oregon Oregon Military Department Oregon National Guard Theft United States

Veteran Affairs Department Suffers Data Breach

May 24th, 2010

: Laptop Encryption by Alertsec

Via techdirt.com- The Veterans Administration (VA) should rename itself to the “Ministry of Data Leaks. It is because every year they report loss of a computer/laptop which contains unencrypted data. As a result, several security gaps are being found out in the Department of Veterans Affairs which can potentially lead to data and information security fraud. Once again, two different data breach cases have been reported. In the first incident, an unencrypted laptop was stolen, which held the social security number and other information of 616 veterans. Somedays later, a log book from a medical lab in Texas containing personal information of 3,265 veterans went missing. While it is not clear whether the data was breached, the alarmbells have rightly started ringing. This incident demonstrates the need for VA to work tightly on issues pertaining to cyber security with contractors.

In the first case, the laptop was stolen on April 22 from the personal vehicle of the contractor’s employees. On the discovery of loss, the authorities were identified immediately and subsequently the VA was notified the following day. In addition, both the user account and server access from the laptop was disabled.

In a letter issued to Shinseki, Mr. Steve Buyer, the party member of the house House of Representatives’ committee on veterans affairs said, “We would like to express our deepest concern about the continued use of unencrypted devices within VA, despite the ongoing efforts to stop such use”.

According to Mr. Buyer, 25 of 69 contracts have nothing in the contract related to encrypted data which is more than 28% of the VA’s vendor contracts.

Mr. Buyer added, “I can only conclude from this incident that VA’s procurement processes seriously lack standardization in content, fail to articulate requirements, and [lack] compliance oversight”.

In response to Mr. Buyer’s statement, VA official Katie Roberts mentioned, “The contractor self reported the incident and has disabled the user account and server access from the stolen laptop. No further access from this laptop is possible”.

It is not the first time that a data breach incident has been reported at VA. 4 years ago a similar incident had been reported after the theft of a VA employee’s laptop which contained data of 26.5 million veterans and 2.2 million service members. On that occassion, the impact of loss for VA was worth $48 million resulting due to notification and a class action lawsuit.

Although there was no report of data usage for illegal purposes, the breach resulted in a unanimous legislation for ensuring the security of veterans’ identity and credit information.

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