14 DAY TRIAL // The IT security world continues to be plagued by data loss incidents; laptops with confidential data are stolen or lost on airports, disks are gone, USB memory devices are misplaced, and so on. According to Blue Chip Technologies, amongst all the things that cause data to be lost, human error accounts for 26% of it all. Let's see now the top three companies that managed to lose private, confidential data this year, as well as the number of people who were affected by these incidents.
No sooner did 2008 begin than Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield found one of its laptops had been stolen. On the 5th of January, a laptop containing information on 300,000 people covered by Horizon was stolen while in the custody of an employee that has yet to be identified. Thankfully, the data on the laptop was password protected and scheduled to automatically delete itself in 17 days' time (by the 23rd of January).
In February, a blood bank from Memphis called Lifeblood lost two laptops containing information on 321,000 donors. The amount of info gathered on each donor was indeed astonishing: name, address, birth date, social security number, telephone number, e-mail address, driver's license, and of course blood type. One question arises: how much private info must you give out in order to donate blood?
The number one spot goes to Scotland's Ambulance Services which in June lost data on a staggering 894,629 calls made to the emergency services over a period in excess of one year. It seems that the data was stored on a portable data disc that was entrusted to courier company TNT so that it could be transported from Paisley to Glasgow. At least the data was encrypted and password protected.
Please note that the ranking presented above is in regard to organizations that specialize in medical services. The all time winner when it comes to data loss is the US Department of Veterans Affairs which managed to lose data regarding 28.6 million people in May 2006.