Armed forces applicants' data lost

by Staff, Brand Republic 16-Oct-08, 12:15

LONDON - Data on 100,000 serving military personnel and 600,000 potential applicants to the armed forces has been lost by Ministry of Defence IT contractor EDS.

According to reports the data was on a hard drive and unencrypted, and included the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth and driving licence details of the serving personnel.

In addition, the names and addresses of referees cited by the applicants were contained on the drive.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence, said: "On Wednesday 8 October we were informed by our contractor EDS that they were unable to account for a portable hard drive used in connection with the administration of armed forces personnel data.

"This came to light during a priority audit EDS are conducting to comply with the Cabinet Office data-handling review. The MoD police are investigating with EDS."

Comments

robin caller - 23/10/2008

Until the Information Commission has the ability to place hefty financial penalties on companies servicing data, these events will continue to occur. Only this week we heard about a data capture company sending excel spreadsheets of consumer data by email without even a password protecting the file. Their clients are bluechips such as Sony, Microsoft, Mitsubishi and Canon. Bad data management is rife, and too many parties just still do not care. Now, if the law enables the ICO to fine £10.00 for each person's data lost, EDR would have a 6 million pound reason to work on their data security. The fault is with the system, which does nothing to encourage compliance with the law.