Swedish Army Loses Classified Information on Memory Stick
Oops:
The daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, turned the stick over to the Armed Forces on Thursday. The paper’s editorial office obtained the memory stick from an individual who discovered it in a public computer center in Stockholm.
An employee of the Armed Forces has reported that the misplaced USB memory stick belongs to him. The employee contacted his superior on Friday and divulged that he had forgotten the memory stick in a public computer. A preliminary technical investigation confirms that the stick belongs to the employee.
The stick contained both unclassified and classified information such as information regarding IED and mine threats in Afghanistan.
I wrote about this sort of thing two years ago:
The point is that it’s now amazingly easy to lose an enormous amount of information. Twenty years ago, someone could break into my office and copy every customer file, every piece of correspondence, everything about my professional life. Today, all he has to do is steal my computer. Or my portable backup drive. Or my small stack of DVD backups. Furthermore, he could sneak into my office and copy all this data, and I’d never know it.
Also this. Although why the Swedish Army doesn’t encrypt its portable storage devices is beyond me.
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Anonymous • January 9, 2008 2:40 PM
The opposite is also occurring in the US. Government agencies are enforcing encrypted volumes on all computers without regard to the type of data and the use of the computer. This is adding huge amounts of overhead to agencies like NOAA that are already strapped for people time. They don’t need to spend money and time on encrypting data that is already public. And the software they are using to encrypt all their windows machines is causing lots of problems and delays. Yes, some of their computers and laptops need to be heavily locked down, but blindly applying that to all computers is not smart. Being outside of these gov. agencies, I can actually get work done that civil servants can’t do because of all the security restrictions.