Security

UK's Data Loss Brings 60 Million People to the Police Station

The UK authorities are looking to secure residents' information

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

27th of November 2007, 10:06 GMT

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Everybody heard of the UK disaster which put the information of 25 million consumers at risk after two CDs sent by a HMRC employee didn't reach the destination and nobody knows a thing about them. But it seems that the UK authorities are now prepared to take measures

to avoid similar problems in the future and they started preparing a special program to register the identities of the residents. This would support the creation of ID cards, a more secure way to store information than the one of distributing CDs containing so important details.

According to The Inquirer, the data protection minister Michael Wills "told parliament that it needed to learn some lessons from the loss of 25 million records". In case you believe this is not such an important thing, please consider that it involves photographs and fingerprints of about 60 million people, the population of the United Kingdom. Sure, it might take a while, but at least it may represent a step for a more secure technology to avoid data loss.

Last week, the HMRC, the British department responsible for tax collecting, confirmed that it lost the information of about 25 million people after their details were put on a CD to be sent to another department. The discs never reached their destination so the authorities were concerned that they could fall into criminal hands and use them for illegal activities.

Since then, the entire world reacted to the event, many of the security companies discussing about minor security utilities which could prevent such a tragedy if they were used. For example, a McAfee official said according to Web User News: "The loss of this data by HM Revenue and Customs is yet another example of the danger of putting sensitive information on an easy-to-lose format such as discs and the result of internal policies not being backed up by good security practice."

TAGS:

uk | hmrc | security

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