Laptop theft affects vets – again
Stars and Stripes reports another government laptop has been stolen with the personal data of some veterans again;
About 131,000 former and current Army National Guard members may have had their personal information compromised when a contractor’s laptop was stolen, Guard officials announced Tuesday.
The laptop, taken July 27 during a conference in Atlanta, included data on soldiers enrolled in the Army National Guard Bonus and Incentives Program. Files containing soldiers’ names, social security numbers, payment dates and bonus amounts were included on the laptop.
Randy Noller, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, said officials don’t have any indication yet that the information has been used to open new credit cards or go after soldiers’ bank accounts.
Yeah, well, as long as our social security numbers are so important and as long as the government lets people walk around with our personal data in laptops, this stuff is going to happen. It just seems to me that the government would stop letting their employees keep our personal files on the local drives in their laptops.
Regardless, I have a subscription to LifeLock because it’s apparently inevitable that someone is going to get a hold of my ID some day. When my wife tried to make me a cosigner on the loan for her new car, LifeLock called me before the bank did.
Who ever succeeds at stealing my identity, I hope they have better luck with it than I have.
Category: Military issues
Yea the Army is pushing a program that called “Data at rest” to secure any data when the computer is not being used.
You might think it would be cheaper for the military to just buy us Lifelock accounts than spend million to secure our SSN’s and probably millions every time a laptop gets stolen. Or better yet, just go back to having a service number that is separate from your social security number.
The Army can only push back so much when the data is on a contractor’s laptop. Even if they require encryption on contractors’ computers, how would they enforce it?
Just another unintended consequence of outsourcing…