SAIC Warns of Possible Data Breach
An AP newswire article by Donna Borak, via The Washington Post, reports that:
Pentagon contractor SAIC Inc. may have compromised personal information about more than half a million military personnel and their relatives because it did not encrypt data transmitted online.More here.
SAIC said Friday it has not found any evidence that the information _ names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers and health information _ was accessed by unauthorized people.
"But we can't rule that possibility out," said Melissa Koskovich, a spokeswoman for SAIC.
SAIC provides technical services for a health benefits program used by active military personnel, retirees and their families.
This is not SAIC's first cyber-security problem.
(Props, Pogo Was Right.)
posted by Fergie @ 7/20/2007 01:42:00 PM
1 Comments:
I am going to try to be neutral; I work at SAIC. The headline is incorrect; there was no BREACH; there was a lapse in security. A lapse in security (meaning that the server was not properly configured with security features) could allow a breach (where someone remotely accesses the server and its data.) Apparently, no one has determined yet if a breach occurred. So, to repeat, the headline is incorrect. Further, it is possible but less likely that anyone would steal data from a datalink, from the transmission lines themselves. As the last line of the article states, the risk is judged to be low. Risk is the probability that a specific magnitude of loss occurred. Either the probability is low or the loss is low, or both. Nonetheless, the events reported are contrary to SAIC policy and SAIC business practices.bigred12
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