More Data Loss, Eh?
Comptroller Susan Combs offered another apology Thursday for the information breach in her agency, saying she now is offering a year of free credit monitoring to the 3.5 million people at risk of identity theft after their data was exposed on a public computer server…She announced in a written statement April 11 that the Social Security numbers and other personal information of 3.5 million people were left exposed for a year or more in a publicly accessible computer server at her agency.
According to this article in the Dallas Morning News, 3.5 million identities were left free for the taking on a public server for at least a year. That is a colossal security lapse. However, it is a fairly responsible remediation that credit monitoring is being made available for the affected users. (Contrast this with Sony’s recent Playstation Network breach; Sony won’t even confirm whether or not credit card information was accessed in their attack.) Still, had literally any effort been put into keeping that information secured, the state of Texas wouldn’t have to spend an estimated $21 million for the credit monitoring services.
The security arena is one in which the maxim “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” holds especially true. How much would it have cost to audit that server deployment? A few thousand dollars? Tens of thousands of dollars? Hundreds of thousands? Any answer less than “21 million dollars” means that this should never have happened.