Yet Another Laptop Theft...This One With Info About 26.5 MILLION Military Vets

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There was a widely reported Reuters story today, "Data on 26.5 million veterans stolen from home" about yet another laptop theft with massive amounts of personal information stored upon it. The theft took place sometime this month. Data included names, social security numbers and birthdates.

The Department of Veterans Affairs spokesperson indicated the employee took home this large amount of data in violation of "rules and regulations and policies."

Well, it is good they had these policies in place. Policies cannot prevent people from doing the wrong things, but they are necessary to establish the expectations for appropriate business activities, and the security framework for an information handling and processing environment.

Hopefully there are some strong sanctions policies also in place. The employee was put on administrative leave during the investigation.

Policies, though, without communicating them to personnel will be ineffective...people cannot be expected to do the right thing if they are not told what the right thing is to do. Is there a strong information security education program in place at these companies where such incidents are occurring? I think of the oft-quoted Rumsfeld quote when these incidents occur and I question whether or not there is adequate awareness and training in place, "But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." Your personnel don't know that they don't know about information security risks if you have not been communicating with them. This is a huge risk...ignorance is definitely not bliss for your organization. Companies need to start beefing up their awareness and training efforts or these types of senseless and avoidable incidents will continue to occur.

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

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