Sunday, November 04, 2007

HMRC loses 15,000 personal data records by courier

According to the Government, ID cards, and the Identity database is, as with all technology of this sort, full of "safeguards". They take our data very seriously you see. So seriously in fact that Her Majestys Revenue and Custom apparently put in on cds, give it to couriers and then wait a month before informing 15,000 tpeople hat their personal data has been lost.

Apparently the data is "encoded" and measures have been put in place to monitor the people whose data was on the disk. This suggests, at least to me, that the encoding was not particularly strong. It might be worth someone asking a question about what their encryption policy actually is.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope my records were on those lost disks. People would have paid the couriers good money to "lose" them. Maybe someone did!

Anonymous said...

Knowing the competence of our "lords and masters" I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was ROT-13 ...

Anonymous said...

'encoded' is typical government bullshit. All data that is recorded digitally is encoded - represented by a string of 0s & 1s. There has been no statement that the data was encrypted; in other words it is in readable format.

Anonymous said...

Believe me, the data was not encrypted, it was just password protected.

Anonymous said...

Probably just a password encrypted zip file, that's about as advanced as their technology gets!

Barnacle Bill said...

Ah with the password stuck to the back of each CD case!

James Higham said...

Not to worry. They'll retrieve it just looking through Facebook - quite effective in supplying personal data to governmental bodies.