Thursday, April 24, 2014

Privacy Commissioner loses hard-drive with unencrypted personal information about 800 employees

Mark Goldberg over at Telecom Trends is blogging about an article in the print edition of the Toronto Star (Did Privacy Commissioner lose private information? that reports the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's office lost a hard-drive with the unencrypted personal information on 800 current and former employees.

The loss occurred when the OPC moved offices from downtown Ottawa to Gatineau and apparently went undetected for quite some time. I expect more details will emerge before long.

Of course, this is supreme irony and likely delicious irony to those agencies who the OPC has chided for inadequate security.

It also highlights that the greatest risk to personal information is mobile and portable devices, whether they are computers or phones, or portable storage devices. These things are small, easy to steal and very easy to lose. They are lost and compromised ALL THE TIME. If Canada and the OPC had a comprehensive cloud strategy that kept all the sensitive personal information in secure data centres, behind firewalls and properly secured, this sort of thing would never happen.

Stay tuned for more ...

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