These days data is like the digital plasma that keeps things together. It makes everything run. It’s needed. And once it’s lost—someone is in some serious trouble. Maybe it’s the person who had it and misplaced it. Maybe it’s the person it belonged to originally. Maybe it’s a whole city’s worth of people. Either way you cut it, it’s never good and unfortunately it’s happened far too often. For your paranoid pleasure—here are fifteen of the most outrageous data losses of all time.
15. British Home Office Loses Data On All English & Wales Prisoners
The British are pretty finicky about their lives. You know the cliche, stiff upper lip, Buckingham palace guards and so forth. They’re polite but impersonal and tend to keep to themselves. They bother no one and live peacefully. Their peaceful lives got the mother load of a shake down when the data on 84,000 prisoners got misplaced. Yes, misplaced. A British Home Office worker simply “misplaced” a thumb drive. Unsure of where he sat it last. Under the bathroom sink, in the pub down the street? Who knows? There was no lightning strike or EMP bombing—just misplaced. Someone downloaded the data for every prisoner in both England and Wales from the secure servers onto a freaking thumb drive which the government worker then promptly lost. “Hey Billy, I’m gonna put all this info about the criminals on this drive with pics of my summer vacation. Think that’s ok?” “Just DON’T LOSE IT”. Hmm. Fail.
14. Ma.gnolia Suffers A Meltdown
I’ve got a home PC. It’s not mobile. I’ve got a pile of bookmarks that I like to visit and revisit when I’m out or at the office or the library. Thankfully there’s Ma.gnolia. Wait! Oh actually… there was Ma.gnolia. Ma.gnolia committed the cardinal sin in online resources. It went down. This is monumental in the online world. Data gone forever, lost in the cloud. That bookmark to that site with the people doing the thing at the place with the something on the gizmo? Never to be found again. Data corruption and loss might be technically redeemable but the faith lost might just be irreparable, although they are trying with a relaunch of the service, now called “Gnolia”. The letters “Ma” were apparently lost in the chaos. Pretty sure most people are just going to use Delicious at this point.
13. Daily Mail Loses Employee Data
Karma really is vengeful and the folks at the Daily Mail found out back in 2008. Yes, these are the same folks who waste no time in quickly pointing out the fallacies of the government when it loses data, slips up, jeopardizes someone’s security. So—guess what happened to the whistleblowers? Indeed—these finger pointers got the finger pointed at them—and not the index finger—when one of their very own laptops got lifted by someone with sticky fingers. What did it contain? Only “personal information on thousands of members of the news organization’s staff and freelancers, including their bank account numbers and sort codes in addition to the more standard names and addresses”. Like rain on your wedding day. Sort of.
12. Department of Veteran Affairs Stolen Laptop
Yet sometimes the Daily Mail has a finger to point as in the case of the Runaway Laptop of the Department of Veteran Affairs. An employee for the Department took the laptop home and it mysteriously got boosted. The laptop contained info and data on nearly 27 million veterans and GIs. The computer made it’s reappearance two months later nearly four miles away being sold on the after market but luckily after checking the hard drive it appears the thief didn’t access the data. What was that sound? All the buttcheeks in Washington unclenching at once.
11. British Royal Navy Data Stolen
The good folks in Britain are loaded with security issues. Here we are with the Royal Navy—the fricking ROYAL NAVY—falling down on the job when it comes to security. How have they not been attacked this century? They lost information on everyone who had applied to join the armed forced for the last ten years. That’s a mass load of people. How? Did someone sneak in? Pull an Ocean’s 14? Sneak in under guise of darkness? Nope. A Royal Navy Officer left the laptop in his car and it was promptly stolen. This is an elaborate breach of security that could have been avoided with the high tech solution of locking the car doors, or better yet not leaving a laptop in your car at all. People will steal anything that’s not bolted down! Fifteen year old girls worry more about their cell phones than these people do about national security.
10. Microsoft Butchers The Sidekick
Danger, the company that makes the Sidekick, the little gem that is all of T-Mobile’s cell phone line up, was acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft then promptly lost all of it’s user’s data, I’m sure leaving customers wondering exactly how much T-Mobile’s early termination feeds were. Microsoft eventually put out a press release stating “Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device—such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos—that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”
9. Virgina Loses Prescription Drug Records
If there’s anything people are uptight about when it comes to privacy it’s definitely their health information. In Virginia, some hapless schmuck managed to get his hands on some serious data by hacking into the Virginia State Government’s Prescription Monitoring Program and downloading around 8.3 million records. The criminal mastermind then issued a ransom statement, saying “I don’t know what all this [expletive] is worth or who would pay for it, but I’m bettin’ someone will”. He was wrong, but I’m sure Virginia residents weren’t pleased with the situation.
8. Health Net Insurance Loses Data On 1.5 Million Customers
Guess where I don’t get my health insurance? Health Net Insurance. Why? No, not because they have a lame name but because they managed to lose the data and info on 1.5 million people because a a portable hard drive got lost. Yes, once again, that much data just snuck off. Maybe Rover buried it in the yard with the TV remote. Maybe it got pawned for some money to get some blow. That’s possible, right? However, that’s quite a bit of people who are sitting around with their information floating around out there, wondering if they’re gonna get woken up in the middle of the night by creditors screaming for their money because their cards are maxed out and someone just bought 270 burros in Mexico and the Yakuza in Japan are ripped off and they think you did it. Ok, maybe (probably?) it’s not that bad. The Attorney General has promised an investigation. Not much help. Here’s some help: that much info shouldn’t be portable.
7. Verisign: Not As Secure As You Might Believe
VeriSign—you probably know them if you do much online shopping, are big in the website world especially when it comes to security certification to reassure customers that their data is safe on a certain site when making purchases. So anyone who makes a living, designed a business out of, and is daily involved with security should know how to protect their own info and digital data, no? Apparently not. Once again a laptop was lost, and this one happened to contain private info on all Verisign employees. The info included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, telephone numbers, and salary records, so you know, nothing too important.
6. Courier Service Loses Data On 25 Million People
We’re back in the UK where they seem to have a serious issue with data security, this time to a government department which copied info on 25 million people onto a CD, and sent it somewhere by courier. Naturally enough it never showed up. That’s right, just lost. Here’s the breakdown. The database was copied onto a pair of CDs and sent by courier from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to the National Audit Office (NAO), but the discs were never received. The worst thing? Not even close to the first time this happened with this particular government agency.
5. Los Alamos Computers Go Missing
Laptop theft is actually a problem in most organizations that deal with sensitive data, but there’s sensitive data and then there’s SENSITIVE data, and the people at Los Alamos nuclear weapons facility are certainly dealing with the latter. Unfortunately they don’t seem to be taking special precautions with their data, seeing computers go missing time and time again. The current tally from 2008 seems to be about eighty, which seems like something of a problem for an organization that one would think would be obsessed with security.
4. Bank of America Loses Data On 1.2 Government Employees
Bank of America managed to put 1.2 million government employees at risk by losing a backup tape containing the personal data from government accounts. BoA in charge of billions of dollars and yet something as trivial as a backup tape escapes their notice. They’re obviously not sweating the small stuff. Oh, and this one probably got some extra attention, because amongst those 1.2 million people was one Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).
3. CardSystems Gets Hacked
40 million people had their information compromised when hackers hacked into CardSystems, a company that manages credit and debit cards. Over 40 million card accounts were exposed to potential fraud due to a security breach that occurred at a third-party processor of payment card transactions. Of the more than 40 million accounts exposed, information on only 68,000 Mastercard accounts, 100,000 Visa accounts and 30,000 accounts from other card brands are known to have been exported by the hackers. It was later discovered that CardSystems failed to secure their network, despite having been certified secure to a data security standard. Visa told Wired magazine that CardSystems received a security certification in 2004, but post incident records indicated the network was no longer secure at the time of the data breach.
2. National Archive and Records Loses 76 Million Social Security Numbers
The National Archive and Records Agency who keeps up with the records of the US military had a broken hard drive. So they sent it back to GMRI for repair and recycling. Guess what they didn’t do? Erase the info of 76 million military individuals. Not just names and addresses, not just 76 million social security numbers but also Secret Service and White House operations procedures, along with who knows what else.
1. Heartland Payment Systems Hacking Exposes 130 Million
A hacker named Albert Gonzalez (known as Segvec in hacker circles) and his cronies hacked Heartland Payment Systems, the sixth largest credit card processor in the country, (I know, I knew exactly who they were) and through an SQL injection managed to plant scripts that siphoned the credit card and personal data of over 130 million people, the biggest data breach of 2009 and possibly the biggest of all time. This kind of thing is becoming all too common, and we won’t be surprised to see even bigger incidents in years to come as companies continue failing to take data security seriously.
If you want to backup your online accounts to prevent being the victim of outrageous data loss, signup for Backupify. .
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If these are in order, Sidekick loss should have been top 5.
really a very cool stuff to read !! i won’t know about these data losses , so thanks for sharing such information to us !
This is great viral marketing, kudos.
Ouch I think the Magnolia one was the worst.
The whole point was keeping your bookmarks safe in the cloud, and they totally lost everyone’s stuff. It’s the only one on the list where the sole and only purpose was compromised by the data loss.
we are never safe, no matter what we do. This is terrible. If we still stuck with the old pen and paper or type writer, instead of a computer…I think we’d be less likely to have our shit stolen. Oh wait, but i’m sure there’d be some major FIRE…so no matter what, we’re not safe with any of our information.
Hmm. Is backupify safe? After all, it’s too just a company (at the most); a website would be precise.
It makes me wonder really, what makes backupify and other sites that backup masses of data for you really secure? I’m more concerned with losing all my privacy to all my data at once, than simply a single account. While that one account may be a bad thing, all of them is life altering. I’d personally feel much safer if I had the option of having the whole of the backup on my computer and have backupify just check and update the information to me locally.
Should my password be compromised or some other error on the service provider’s end take place, I’m entirely sure that the redundancy of the situation would be a moot point.
Currently I’m somewhat pleased with the backupify service, but would love to see it take a step towards encryption and possibly something as advanced as to be a sister to PGP.
As I only send email in plaintext that is signed, except for a few emails I send to individuals who cannot figure it out, I find that it is a very good solution to data comprimisation.
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