Managed File Transfer Blog

You’d think that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) would be on top of data security.  Perhaps best known as the keeper of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the National Archives also holds military records, naturalization records and even the cancelled check from the purchase of Alaska. But this week’s news regarding the NARA data breach illustrates how every organization is potentially vulnerable.

Included on the hard drive that went missing from NARA was sensitive personal information including more than 100,000 Social Security numbers. The NARA data breach is now believed to affect up to 250,000 White House staffers and visitors.  Unfortunately for some unlucky visitors to the White House, that visit might just have become a little more memorable.

The potential sources of a data breach for any organization are numerous – some malicious, some inadvertent. Missing, lost, and stolen hard drives, hacked servers, stolen passwords, unsecure file transfer, are all common sources for data breaches.  Anticipating and designing against all the potential vulnerabilities is a significant effort for any organization.

We have one important piece of advice to help protect you against one source of data breaches:

Lack of a secure file transfer system will be flagged in security audits.  If you don’t already have a secure file transfer system – you need one.  Give us a call.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Data Breach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.