Police send Reg hack CRB check database

confidence

"Gwent Police asked The Register to consider not publishing a story about its serious data breach saying it would undermine public confidence in the force, but we declined."

Should have said, "Gwent Police asked The Register to consider not publishing a story about its serious data breach saying it would CORRECTLY undermine public confidence in the force, but we declined."

The truth will come out.

Ye gods - thank goodness it was sent to someone who knew what to do about it, and I salute your stance - hopefully it will get some proper data handling in place.

We can' t have police forces (or indeed anyone else) expecting silence as a way of covering up mistakes.

I'm starting to like the conservatives more open approach, it will hopefully make things like this more transparant.

Right - i'm off to see it's appeared on wikileaks...

ttfn

Al things considered

It sounds as though once the original error had been made everyone responded appropriately and no-one uttered the dreaded phrase 'lessons will be learned'. The only way to make such mistakes impossible to make is to make the system unusable for it's intended purpose so all long as people 'fess up' and the people who made the mistake are the ones that are punished in some form then there is hope.

OK, not that much hope

But at least they are trying

Somewhat more worrying

How many times has this been done and the recipient has not reported it to the press at the police's request or even not reported it at all?

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Sweet merciful crap.

Under which provision of the DPA is it acceptable to dump incredibly sensitive information like that into a plain-ol' Excel spreedsheet and fling it across the Intertubes in plaintext by SMTP? Accidental cc-ing of the Reg or not - data like that should simply never find itself being transmitted from point to point using that sort of method. I think it's fair to assume that the coppers here email critical data around like this in plain text all the time though. Utter ineptitude.

Human error?

"Investigators are blaming human error for the data breach, rather than the system design."

If it's human error, the erring human concerned is the one who implemented the database in such a way that exports like this are even possible.

What conceivable reason is there for anyone needing all 10,006 names? For any sort of management or analytical purpose, the names could be replaced with anonymous codes.

The really sad thing is that how to do this properly IS well understood. I recall reading about how the (1990?) census data was stored, and how queries were processed such that only sufficiently-anonymous extracts were available. (For example, it would give precise answers to questions about large areas, but once the areas were small enough that individuals could be identified it would introduce random perturbations.) How is it that in the last 20 years, things have got worse rather than better? My guess is that the people in charge weigh up the risk of a breach ("could never happen to us") against the inconvenience of properly protecting the data, and make the wrong choice. In fact, is it a case of "VIP Passenger Syndrome"? Were the 5 recipients of this email senior, i.e. more senior than the IT person who might have considered it a bad idea?

The Register has now deleted

Deleted or wiped?

I don't for a second think that El Reg would do anything underhand but I suppose you have the necessary knowledge to undelete said file so I suppose in the eyes of the police it really isn't deleted.

@Al things considered

They acted appropriately ?

They threatened to fire the minion that had been told to email the data.

Not the bosses who picked the system without thinking of the problems, or who allowed data like this to be emailed around in clear, or didn't look at backup plans like detecting outside email addresses, or having a separate secure system for this type of mail.

It was PC idiot wot did it, so fire him.

A meaningless (and hence wrong) distinction

"Investigators are blaming human error for the data breach, rather than the system design".

But the human beings who operate the system are part of it. If a human operator makes an error of judgment, that is every bit as much a failure of the overall system as a hard disk crash or a programming oversight. The alternative - to exclude the human element from the system - is absurd, as virtually all systems include human elements who can easily make them fail.

Of course the people who are responsible for the system (and who earn really, really big bucks on account of that awesome responsibility) like to think that they can blame anything that goes wrong on the pondlife* who do the actual work. But it ain't so - they, the big cheeses, are equally responsible for hiring and firing the pondlife, and for motivating it, giving it adequate rest breaks, and generally making sure it performs up to specification like every other system component. Gee, if they are really concerned about its performance, they might even go so far as to try talking to pondlife occasionally. You can learn a surprising amount of useful stuff that way.

*Disclaimer: don't get overwrought about my use of this simple vivid term. I am pondlife myself, and very proud of it.

Data Loss Prevention?

I would have hoped that an organisation responsible for a great deal of sensitive information, some of which could put peoples lives at risk, had some kind of DLP system deployed on their email system. It’s quite simple to check outgoing email for tag like 'NOT FOR EXTERNAL DISTRIBUTION’, and hold it for authorisation before sending to external addresses. Such measures are becoming increasingly common in business where fines, loss of business and reputation are at stake.

I could ask

I could ask what business police officers have to

1) keep databases as excel files

2) mailing them around, even internally

but all I really care about is that the entire silly database should not even exist in the first place.

I'd wager

99% of all data breaches are due to human error at some level.

Gwent police...

...should be re-assured that I, for one, have greater confidence in them today than I had yesterday. Why? Well...

Yesterday, I took it as read that such incidents occur but nothing will actually change until someone *really* screws up. Today I read that someone has screwed up and the senior decision makers are red-faced. Therefore, it is likely that sensitive data is safer today than it was yesterday.