As I mentioned earlier, I'm at FCW Events' CIO Summit and the whole story about VA's stolen data was quite the buzz, needless to say. And they say that timing is everything, so it was perfect that there was a session today titled "Identity Management: New challenges for managing access and securing staff." The panel featured Rob Brandewie, director of the Defense Manpower Data Center, and Rich Guida, director of information security for Johnson and Johnson and a former fed who served as chairman of the Federal Public Key Infrastructure Steering Committee.
Both of them spoke of the difficulties of securing data these days because it is potentially so mobile.
I didn't ask them to comment on this case specifically because they don't know the specifics. But I did ask them about securing data.
As far as I understand the VA situation, it isn't even that the laptop was stolen. It was, of course, but the data was on some kind of mobile device.
Here is what the NYT reported this morning:
A Congressional aide briefed on the matter, granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about it, said the information was on disks. Secretary Nicholson, speaking at the same news conference as Attorney General Gonzales, said the worker had taken the data home to work on a department project. Mr. Nicholson described the worker, who has not been identified, as a longtime employee of the agency. He lives in suburban Maryland, a law enforcement official said.
OMB is reminding everybody about securing their data
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