Every time I see one of these stories, I just think to myself, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Not again!”
It seems like these stories are popping up every few weeks these days and who knows about the ones we never hear about.
This time a missing computer backup tape in Ohio is the problem. The tape is from a state database that contains information on state checks Ohio residents that have not yet cashed, some of them income tax refund checks and others lottery prize checks.
The data on the tape includes names, addresses, social security numbers and bank account numbers.
I suspect that we would all cringe if we knew how many databases contained some of our personal information. These days everything is kept on computer databases. Gone are the days of gray filing cabinets full of typewritten records.
As someone who worked in the computer industry for more than 20 years, I understand the importance of backups and making sure they were done was part of my job early in my career, so I certainly have no problem with backup tapes. What I have a problem with very often is the security of those tapes.
In this particular case, the backup tape was stolen from an state intern’s car. Makes you wonder what a low-level employee like an intern would be doing with a tape that has important personal information on it and why he would ever leave it unattended in his car.
Oh yeah, silly me. I am sure it was not the intern’s personal information on the tape. It was just a bunch of strangers, and who cares about them, right?
Apparently, too little attention is being devoted to the security of personal information and that needs to change.
The state of Ohio, to their credit, is paying for identity-theft protection service for those at risk. I just hope it’s a better service than the one my wife was given after some of her personal information was put at risk by a big financial company a couple of years ago. That service was painfully slow to issue alerts when something happened to one of her accounts, sometimes taking a month or more to send an alert.
I’ve recently learned about a fairly new identity-theft protection service that actually sounds pretty good. I’ll be looking into it a bit more and will probably talk about it at some point in the future.
If you want to take a look for yourself, click the following link:
Leave a Reply