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In UK, 12M Taxpayers Lost With USB Stick
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Nov 03, 2008 06:08 AM
from the and-your-little-data-too dept.
from the and-your-little-data-too dept.
An anonymous reader tips a piece from the UK's Daily Mail that recounts another sad tale of the careless loss of massive amounts of private user data. "Ministers have been forced to order an emergency shutdown of a key Government computer system to protect millions of people's private details. The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park containing confidential passcodes to the online Government Gateway system, which covers everything from tax returns to parking tickets. An urgent investigation is now under way into how the stick, belonging to the company which runs the flagship system, came to be lost."
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Submission: UK loses access to 12 million taxpayers on USB! by Anonymous Coward
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How it came to be lost? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got a better question. I'd like to know how this memory stick came to be in the first place!
Putting aside the question of whether such a database of private information has any reason to exist, what possible excuse is there for putting the information to access that database on a portable USB device? It was not a question of if such a device would be lost, but when.
Good security policy demands redundancy for just this reason. A verification system should require--at the very least--a combination of something you know (your personal pin), and something you have (for example, a SecurID or in this case, a USB key with the passcodes on it). That way, if the physical token is lost, security isn't immediately compromised.
This kind of careless attitude towards security wouldn't fly in the corporate world. It's only because it's the government doing it that security is so lax. After all, nobody's job is on the line over this. It's next to impossible to fire a government employee in most countries, epic incompetence--or even outright misconduct--notwithstanding. So expect to see more of this, because there's no incentive to change.
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:5, Informative)
Well I'm working for a corporation, and they forbid the use of USB gadgets for this precise reason - they don't want people copying & later losing the USB drives as they carry work to their homes. It's simply not worth the risk.
Parent
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the one of the few types of story on /. where people aren't clamoring to say that information needs to be free or that it wants to be. Alas, I must agree with you. That would have been much funnier.
Parent
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:5, Informative)
> This kind of careless attitude towards security wouldn't fly in the corporate world. It's only because it's the government doing it that security is so lax.
It was a private company, Atos Origin, which lost the data.
Parent
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:5, Informative)
At a later stage, they introduced a new 'lost-password' procedure for the intranet site which was positively retarded. In essence, when creating an account, you were required to enter three passwords. One of these was the actual password used to enter the site. When you had forgotten your password, you were then required to enter the other two passwords in order to reset the first one.
This was obviously intended as an implementation of the well-known "question-only-you-know-the-answer-to" challenge-response idea. The way it was done though (you had to enter both the 'answer' AND the 'question', and both were displayed as asterisks) rendered the whole system completely useless.
When I pointed this out to the helpdesk, they assured me the whole procedure was approved by very knowledgeable people, and very secure. Besides, there was absolutely no way for them to submit any problem reports to the developers responsible.
Parent
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course that's very secure. It means that anybody who loses their password is completely unable to log in ever again. That's possibly the most secure way of handling things.
My only complaint is that they allow users to log in in the first place. Perhaps they could try encasing all the input devices and CPUs in some sort of rigid plastic case. Or better yet fill the power connections with some sort of epoxy.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's insecure because the default user response to this kind of 'security' is to affix said passwords to screen using a post-it note.
Admittedly, that isn't the system itself being insecure per se...
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:4, Interesting)
Soory for the double post, but I have just noticed that the story is talking about the "Government Gateway" which I have the unfortunate mispleasure of having to use.
The huge irony is that I am having a dig at 'users' circumventing security, whilst at the same time having to record my username and password (albeit not using a post -it) for this particular system, because the government gateway sees fit to not let you choose either, and instead issues you with:
username: AX58HJP7PR
password: Y734BTRT9J
(sorry if that is anyone's btw!)
Making it almost impossible to remember.
The password 'reminder' process then relies on you answering a bunch of questions about your company to get one half of the new password, the other half is sent to your registered e-mail.
Convoluted? They wrote the book.
In any case- the worst someone could do when they log in is pay your tax for you!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I love the little quote marks around "source code". Oh my god, it's the Source Code! Anyway... from that, I daresay that the USB stick wasn't meant to provide access to the database. Probably more as a copy of the gateway system software.
This kind of careless attitude t
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:4, Informative)
I recently attended a lecture by Ben Goldacre, author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian and book of the same name. He regularly debunks newspaper "experts", usually in the medical/health care/nutrition area. He gave numerous examples where the newspaper's so-called experts were, as I would see it, nothing of the sort. Without commenting on the particular case, most newspaper editors are scientific illiterates who will grace with "expert" anybody who knows anything at all about the subject.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Does the Mail have a gallery of these "experts" on standby to give a comment as required for the scare of the day...
From that comment, I'd assume you've never read the Daily Mail. But then you seem to have a list of their recent headlines.
Oh I see, you *think* you're being sarcastic!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
In UK, 12M Taxpayers Lost With USB Stick
Presumably the rest of the population are lost without one.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The corporate world is just as bad. Hell it was a private company which screwed up on this one.
Get this through your head:
"corporate" does not equal "competent".
"Government" does not equal "incompetent"
They are both quite capable of both and both tend towards incompetent.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Translation: MS Word file was password protected.
Re:How it came to be lost? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Industry standard is unencypted.
Parent
Forget how it was lost. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Why was the stick needed? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have witnessed how strict, inflexible security rules force people to break the security in order to get their job done.
Parent
Bet (Score:5, Insightful)
I will bet $100 AUD (Or about 50 UK pounds) that there will be absolutely no jailtime served by anyone involved in the loss of this data, with the possible exception of the poor soul who found it.
Not the first time it's happened by far, and it certainly won't be the last... would you trust a surveillance society that can't even keep track of its own inventory?
Re:Bet (Score:5, Insightful)
I will bet $100 AUD (Or about 50 UK pounds) that there will be absolutely no jailtime served by anyone involved in the loss of this data, with the possible exception of the poor soul who found it.
After the number of high-profile security breaches, the number of well-meaning people who have been treated as suspects by the police and the willingness of the media to pay for such stories, it seems that the only sensible thing to do is very quietly hand it over to a journalist.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Or destroy it.
Seriously, blowtorch it to ashes. What USB stick? The data isn't irreplaceable.
Re:Bet (Score:5, Interesting)
The police will ask for your details and then grill you as to how you stole it and then will take your fingerprints and DNA whether they will prosecute or not and put all this in a database which then then promptly loose again.
You will be shamed and nothing will change.
Giving i to a newspaper will shame the people who made the loss of data possible and then you can hope that some encryption will happen.
There is a huge gap between how things are and how they should be.
Parent
Re:Bet (Score:5, Insightful)
There isn't supposed to be any trust in a surveillance society - that's the whole reason for the surveillance.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah there is; this data is not classified, so is not covered by the same legislation that was used to prosecute the civil servant.
Do we even need another one of these stories? (Score:4, Funny)
It would be nice if the summary was accurate! (Score:4, Informative)
This sounds like typical hyperbole in a Slashdot summary based on a typical Daily Mail scare article. Try reading a more balanced report [bbc.co.uk] from the Beeb.
If you follow that link, you will find that the data was all encrypted, and the memory stick should never have been removed from the contractor's premises. According to the official statements, security was never compromised (though access to the government service's web interface was temporarily suspended). And it's not some nasty central database to spy on everyone, it's a useful system that allows you to do things like filing your tax return on-line rather than messing around with lots of paperwork — one of the few IT projects our government actually seems to have got right!
This was just one guy working for a contractor who screwed up by not following protocol, and assuming the data really was properly encrypted, the security procedures have done their job to mitigate the damage. There is nothing to see here. Please move along, and spend your time worrying about the numerous cases where data really has been compromised and the numerous databases that really don't need to exist.
Parent
12M Taxpayers Lost? (Score:5, Funny)
Damn...that's quite a lot of people to go missing.
Re:12M Taxpayers Lost? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
The unknown (Score:4, Insightful)
UK Government loses all data on everyone (Score:5, Funny)
Annual reports from Whitehall departments show that the government has lost all data it ever held on anyone. [today.com]
Losses have occurred through couriered unencrypted disks, misplaced memory sticks, lost laptops, briefcases left on trains and files falling down the side of the tea machine. "The real scandal is that a train was running for them to lose a case on," said a source whose name has been lost.
Treasury minister Jane Kennedy said the HM Revenue and Customs breaches did not necessarily result in data losses, or at least any that they have records of. HMRC said it takes data losses and security breaches "very seriously" and thoroughly investigates any breach that it does not lose track of.
Information Commissioner Richard Thomas has served enforcement notices on various departments for their data losses, but the departments in question could not find their office addresses to accept the notices. They noted, however, that Mr Thomas' call was very important to them, and that he had been placed in a queue.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith reassured citizens that plans for an all-encompassing ID card linked to biometric passports and a universal medical record with the NHS would not change because of these losses. "We won't even be thinking about them."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That would be something! (Score:5, Interesting)
If they could lose taxpayers just like that, these idiots would be a lot more careful, wouldn't they? Perhaps that's the way to solve this problem: If you lose my data, then I don't pay taxes for a year.
But how .. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it that whenever something like this gets *found*, the person doing the finding always understands what's on it? If any of my typical pub going friends and relatives found this the chances of them realising what is on it is pretty slim, and it would most likely get formated.
How many other memory sticks get lost and found by people that don't realise what is on them, or why is it that every memory stick found is always found by an IT literate with the know how to work out what they contain and the immediate urge to sell their story to a tabloid ...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But how .. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Same old same old... (Score:3, Informative)
Britain's a joke. I've been living there for most of the last year and barely a week seems to have gone by without a 12-14 year old kid getting stabbed or a large batch of confidential personal data going missing from some government department or other.
It's unbelievable. When are they going to get their shit together???
(Before anyone gets too narky, i'm British - i just haven't lived there for nearly 25 years).
Re:Same old same old... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, this is why the British government wanted to increase the terrorist detention limit to 42 days; to make sure they had enough time to gather all the information about a suspect.
They just didn't explain that most of those 42 days would be working out what bloody train they'd left their details on.
See, this is why I don't do my taxes.*
* yes, of course I do, I just do them on paper. it's actually a shorter form iirc.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You raise two quite unrelated issues.
I was in the USA for 2 years and barely 10 minutes goes by without someone being murdered with a gun over there. The odd knifing in the UK is basically nothing compared to this. More interesting is the media frenzy - in the UK it's actually news when a murder happens. In the US it's only news if the victim is white.
As for data losses, I don't know, it's like a piss take of epic proportions.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
in the UK it's actually news when a murder happens. In the US it's only news if the victim is white
The US has only about 3 times the murder rate of the UK (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita) While that's a lot worse, it's not enough to justify such a holier-than-thou attitude.
Re:Same old same old... (Score:4, Insightful)
To an extent it's just because that's what sells papers. There are always kids being stabbed and planes crashing and data being lost. It's just if kids being stabbed becomes a hot topic, you print more stories on stabbed kids.
I really don't think much has changed, but the Mail is keen to point out that the world is ending, and it's probably Johnny Foreigner's fault.
Parent
Re:Same old same old... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what reading a "newspaper" like the Daily Mail will do to you. If you read tomorrow's copy you'll find out it's all 100% due to immigrants, the EU and Gordon Brown (who "according to a source", was seen carrying out the stabbings himself).
In reality though, looking at the police stats, there's actually only been a single 14 year-old (and no one younger) who's been murdered this year in the UK. There was a clump of teen stabbings in London at the start of the year but this has reversed to actually being slightly below average over the year.
The murder rate in the UK currently stands at 1.4 per 100,000 which is only about 1/4 the US murder rate of 5.5 per 100,000 (which itself is extremely low by historical standards).
So clearly the actual statistics and reality aren't coming out in the media. My problem with this is that it's pretty hard for a rational and correct solution to be engineered when everyone's being told irrational scare stories everyday by newspapers with a clear finnancially vested interest in exaggerating facts.
Parent
it's the daily mail - probably rubbish (Score:5, Informative)
Re:it's the daily mail - probably rubbish (Score:5, Funny)
"If you can get past the bile, hate, bias, bitterness and sensationalism, ask youself: does this publication actually have any credibility?"
Once you get past all that, there's no content left in the Daily Mail, so its credibility or otherwise is moot.
Parent
Why the need for a USB stick at all? (Score:5, Interesting)
Surveillance Society (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Surveillance Society (Score:5, Insightful)
Silly citizen. The rules apply to you, not us.
Parent
Suggestion for the new Beta Index page (Score:5, Informative)
We need a -dailymail option, currently I am having to use -notthebest, which isn't quite right. It does not adequately cover the feeling of anger and disappointment, nor the small amount of bile that leaps from my stomach to my mouth, at the sight of a Daily Mail article on the Slashdot homepage.
I know it's bad to regard an article as an utter fabrication, just because of where it originated. But in this case we must make an exception, because every other article the Daily Mail has ever printed has been a half-truth or outright lie.
FFS, this is the 'newspaper' that bitched about the number of Jews immigrating to Britain in the late 30's. They're not called the Daily Hate for no reason.
This sums up the Daily Mail [youtube.com], from the perspective of your average-Brit-with-a-clue. Seriously, please do not consider the Daily Mail as a reliable source, of anything. Ever.
Privacy losses (Score:5, Informative)
Gordon Brown has made a frank admission that government cannot promise the safety of personal data entrusted by the public. The Prime Minister was speaking hours after it emerged that a memory stick containing the passwords to a government website used submit online tax returns had been lost.
Even more worrying considering government rhetoric [guardian.co.uk] on the £20bn ID cards they want:
From 2010, the government will target young people to get an identity card on a voluntary basis "to assist them in proving their identity as they start their independent life in society", with full roll-out to all British citizens starting from 2011. "The government are kidding themselves if they think ID cards for foreign nationals will protect against illegal immigration or terrorism - since they don't apply to those coming here for less than three months. "ID cards are an expensive white elephant that risk making us less - not more - safe. It is high time the government scrapped this ill-fated project." The Liberal Democrats said the cards' "fancy design" did not detract from the fact that they remained an intrusion into people's liberty. Chris Huhne, the party's home affairs spokesman, said: "It does not matter how fancy the design of ID cards is, they remain a grotesque intrusion on the liberty of the British people. "The government is using vulnerable members of our society, like foreign nationals who do not have the vote, as guinea pigs for a deeply unpopular and unworkable policy. When voting adults are forced to carry ID cards, this scheme will prove to be a laminated poll tax."
And from the government mouthpiece the BBC [bbc.co.uk]:
SNP Home Affairs spokesman Pete Wishart MP said his party had opposed ID cards from the outset but the government's "abysmal record on data protection" was reason enough to cancel them. He said the government looked "absurd" for pushing ahead with such a costly project. "These cards will not make our communities more secure, they will not reduce the terrorist threat and they will not make public services more efficient," said Mr Wishart. Phil Booth, head of the national No2ID campaign group, attacked the roll-out of the cards as a "softening-up exercise". "The Home Office is trying to salami slice the population to get this scheme going in any way they can," Mr Booth told the BBC. "Once they get some people to take the card it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. "The volume of foreign nationals involved is minuscule so it won't do anything to tackle illegal immigration."
It was a French company, not UK Govt. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm afraid the solution is roughly as follows, in a simple step by step guide
Worked for Nelson, anyway.