VA investigating another missing hard drive
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is investigating a missing hard drive containing the personal records of 48,000 military veterans, the agency said. The external hard drive contained about 20,000 personal records that were not encrypted, according to information from U.S. Representative Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican. A VA employee reported the hard drive missing from an agency Birmingham, Alabama, facility on Jan. 22, according to a VA press release. The VA and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation are investigating the missing hard drive, the VA said in its Friday press release. The VA's Office of Information and Technology is conducting a separate investigation, Jim Nicholson, VA's secretary, said in a statement. "We intend to get to the bottom of this, and we will take aggressive steps to protect and assist anyone whose information may have been involved," Nicholson added. In May, the VA reported a laptop and hard drive containing the personal records of 26.5 million military veterans and their families had beenÂ stolen from an employee's home. Police laterÂ recovered the hardware, and the VA said computer forensics tests indicated thieves had not accessed the data, but the theft set off criticism from several members of Congress about theÂ VA's cybersecurity practices. The hard drive in Alabama was used to back up information contained on an employeeâs office computer, and may have contained data from research projects the employee was involved in, as well as personal information, the VA said. The VA Office of Inspector General has seized the employeeâs computer and is analyzing its contents, the VA said. The VA is prepared to notify affected people and provide free credit monitoring, the agency said. The VA will continue to aim to be a leader in protecting personal information, Nicholson said in his statement. In August, the VA also reported that a desktop computer containing the personal information of 38,000 veterans was missing from the office of Unisys Corp., the subcontractor assisting at the agency's medical centers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The lost VA hardware prompted a congressional review of other U.S. government agencies, and agencies reported thousands of laptops missing in the last five years.
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Device features two optical drives and a 160GB hard drive for storing content.
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File-recovery software can resurrect every piece of porn and propaganda you've emptied out of your computer's Recycle Bin. It looks as if they're removed from the hard drive, but the 1s and 0s of the "deleted" files still exist. Wired's How To Wiki shows you a couple of ways to leave no trace behind.
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A stolen computer storage device contained more than twice the number of taxpayers' identifications than had been previously reported, Gov. Ted Strickland said Wednesday, but he emphasized there is still no indication the data have been compromised.
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Looks like I'll get the drive back soon. First I got a call from the Emeryville store, then I got a call from a person in Apple Executive offices (she gave me her name and number, but I'm not going to publish it here). I'll report back when I have more info. PS: The number of idiotic comments has gone way up.
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Hard disk containing details on 3 million candidates goes missing at facility run by contractor for the Driving Standards Agency.
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WASHINGTON - An inventory has found another case of missing data involving nuclear weapons, this time at the Energy Department's regional office in Albuquerque, N.M., the department disclosed Thursday.    The Energy Department said that an "accounting discrepancy" involving three copies of a "controlled removable electronic media" - or CREM - was found at the regional office as part of the nationwide inventory of such devices...
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There are multiple known instances of lost or stolen tapes but, to the best of my knowledge, not one reported instance of anyone recovering and maliciously using data stored on missing tapes. It's just too hard for an average thief to retrieve it.
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The Department of Veterans Affairs has disclosed that information on more than half a million individuals and about 1.3 million non-VA physicians, both living and dead, is missing or might have been stolen. The information was stored on a portable hard drive that was being used by a VA employee at the department's facility in Birmingham, Ala.
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Google's Desktop Search application indexes a PC hard drive when it's not being used
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Reports of corporate data leaks, lost laptops, and misplaced backup tapes are so commonplace that many no longer warrant a mention in the press. So common are corporate data leaks of one form or another that only the multimegaton events -- TJX, the Veterans Administration, or DuPont -- get covered.
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and other bizarre data recovery disasters It's not only IT Help Desks that get strange queries and requests. Data recovery specialists at UK-based firm Disklabs have compiled an illuminating list of the oddest requests for assistance it receives from the 50,000 cases a year it deals with involving people needing to get their data recovered.â¦
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Got backup? How about a new 1-terabyte drive for $70 off the usual price?
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A portable hard drive that may contain the personal information of up to 48,000 veterans may have been stolen, the Department of Veterans Affairs and a lawmaker said Friday.
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WASHINGTON -- An inventory has found another case of missing data involving nuclear weapons, this time at the Energy Department&#39;s regional office in Albuquerque, NM, the department disclosed Thursday.
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An inventory has found another case of missing data involving nuclear weapons, this time at the Energy Department's regional office in Albuquerque, N.M., the department disclosed Thursday.
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The holidays are done at last. Time to get back to normal. Well, perhaps not entirely normal. Our computers, after all, are normally in a state of chaos, cluttered with once-cherished files that we can't even find anymore.