Top 3 Medical Organizations to lose data in 2008

Written by IT News on 1:45 PM

IT security world continues to be plagued by incidents of data loss; laptops with confidential data are stolen or lost at airports, have disks, USB memory devices are hidden, and so forth. According technology blue chips, among all the things that cause data to be lost, human error accounts for 26% of everything. Let's see now the first three companies that manage to lose private, confidential data this year and the number of people affected by these incidents.

No sooner does not begin by 2008 Horizon Cross Blue Shield Blue found in one of its laptops were stolen. On 5 January, a laptop containing information about 300000 people covered by Horizon was stolen while in custody of employees who have not yet been identified. Thankfully, the data on the laptop was password protected and scheduled to automatically delete itself in 17 days' time (23 January).

In February, from one blood bank Memphis, called the lifeblood lost two laptops containing information on 321000 donors. The amount of information collected for each donor is truly amazing: name, address, birth date, social security numbers, phone number and email address, driving license, and of course blood type. One question arises: how much private information, should you give, to donate blood?

Number one spot goes to Scotland of the Office for Emergency Assistance Services, which in June lost data staggering 894629 calls to emergency services for a period exceeding one year. It seems that the data are stored data on portable disk, which was entrusted to the courier company TNT, so that they can be transported by TANTRA to Glasgow. At least the data is encrypted and password protected.

Note that the ranking is presented above in respect of organizations which specialize in medical services. Currently all the winner when it comes to loss of data is U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which managed to lose data for 28.6 million people in May 2006.