If you didn’t participate in the Open Security Foundation‘s fun “Oldest Incident Contest,” you can still enjoy the fruits of others’ labor. The contest ended last week, and it uncovered a lot of fascinating old breaches that have been added to OSF’s DataLoss DB.
Grand prize winner Corey J Chandler (AKA “Sorthum”) submitted a 1953 incident that involved the theft of Social Security numbers from Local 338, International Longshoremen’s Association. That is now the oldest theft of Social Security numbers incident in the database. Corey also submitted an intriguing 1903 Los Angeles Times article about how some records for the Southern California Hospital for the Insane had gone missing and two employees had been implicated. I spent an enjoyable hour or so today digging into that one a bit more and have sent my findings on to the folks at OSF. In the process of researching, I learned a lot about what life must have been like in those hospitals at the turn of the last century.
The second place entry was submitted by “midnitrc” and involved the 1983 hacking of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in NYC. The funny thing is that I actually knew about that hacking back then because my father had already been hospitalized there. But did I think to submit it to the contest? No………. Congrats, “midnitrc!”
Yours truly earned 3rd place for the 1984 TRW/Sears hack. That entry and another one of my entries about Revenue Canada both wound up on OSF’s Top 10 biggest breaches list.
Special thanks to the OSF curators and volunteers and to their great sponsors: CREDANT, Arcsight , AON TechShield , StrikeForce Technologies, Inc. and ITAC Sentinel. Amazingly, within minutes of my iPod Touch arriving, my daughter wanted to be my new best friend.
OSF is thinking about running another contest in the future. If they do, I hope you’ll 
participate. And if you are so inclined, OSF cheerfully accepts donations of your time, skills, and yes, even money. I hope you’ll support them. As for me, I’ll keep digging, and will enjoy my new title of “Archaeologist” on OSF.