Missing Ark. Guard hard drive located

Missing Ark. Guard hard drive located
The Associated Press
Posted : Monday May 17, 2010 16:30:11 EDT

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A hard drive containing personal information about more than 32,000 current and former Arkansas National Guard soldiers has been located.

The hard drive had been missing since Feb. 22. The Guard said Monday that the hard drive was located at the Virginia home of a relative of the soldier who misplaced it. Guard officials said the hard drive has been returned to Camp Robinson and destroyed.

The soldier was carrying the hard drive as a backup of his work information.



unhappycamper comment: The soldier took the hard drive to a relative's home and lost it? Shades of Choicepoint......

My son received a letter a few weeks ago about this. Apparently, his info was on this disk. I'm glad they tracked it down.

as bigger and bigger portable storage devices are created the more we are seeing critical data put on them and then the device gets stolen or misplaced.

Choicepoint was data theft that they did not notify the people whose data was stolen. This is unlikely to be theft but rather I expect a programmer that was working on the database and accidentally brought a copy out with him. According to this article:

http://www.katv.com/news/stories/0510/736842.html

The "hard drive" was an external drive and I would bet it was a flash drive. I say this was a programmer that did this because it was a copy of the database that was on the drive. A user would not be working directly with the database, they would be using a front end app. The database would not reside on the users computer but rather on a server somewhere, not only would the user almost certainly not know how to find it but would almost certainly not have access authority to make a copy of the database.

This is still a serious breach, don't get me wrong, I am not making excuses for the guy, he was clearly wrong. If he worked for me I would fire him without a second thought but I don't think it was a stolen for identity theft.