And poof… It sounds like many people may have known for years about the sloppy infosecurity being used but no one really did anything to put a more secure system in place… and so, of course, it was inevitable that disaster struck.
Matthew M. Burke reports:
The Marine Corps has changed the way it handles personal information after a servicemember lost a disk containing the data of 164,000 people who registered a vehicle for Okinawa base access between January 2007 and September 2017.
On Sept. 22, an airman with Okinawa’s Joint Service Vehicle Registration Office at Camp Foster handed the disk to an Air Force security officer from Kadena Air Base. That security officer was tasked with bringing the disk — which was not password protected or encrypted — to Kadena security forces’ headquarters, where the data were to be uploaded into the Air Force system.
The disk was never seen again.
Now you may think ok, vehicle info. But it was much much more than that:
names, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, ID numbers, physical descriptions of personnel, vehicle identification numbers and plate numbers, service branch and duty information for servicemembers, dependents, civilian federal employees, contractors and local national master labor contractors.
Read more on Stars and Stripes.