Bermuda Triangle Effect on laptop computers at US Department of Commerce

22/09/2006 Written by Roberto Preatoni (SyS64738)

Over 1100 lap­top com­put­ers got lost in the offices of the U.S. Depart­ment of Com­merce since 2001, includ­ing nearly 250 from the cen­sus Bureau con­tain­ing names and social secu­rity num­bers, fed­eral offi­cials said yesterday.

As the Wash­ing­ton Post reported, last sum­mer the House Com­mit­tee on Gov­ern­ment Reform asked 17 fed­eral depart­ments to file up in details any loss of com­put­ers con­tain­ing sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion, and the result of such an inven­tory reveals a dan­ger­ous phe­nom­e­non that reminds us those dis­ap­pear­ances in Bermuda Tri­an­gle area…

Indeed, just 10 depart­ments responded to the request and all of them are char­ac­ter­ized by the van­ish­ing of huge amounts of data, but accord­ing to the direc­tor of the com­mit­tee the losses at Depart­ment of Com­merce “are by far the most egregious”.

He added then, that remain­ing seven depart­ments which didn’t pro­vide the Con­gress an inven­tory of stolen or lost lap­tops could have to han­dle sim­i­lar secu­rity problems.

6200 house­holds’ data could have been com­pro­mised, accord­ing to last val­u­a­tion con­sid­er­ing that the num­ber of stolen lap­tops is increas­ing day bay day as inves­ti­ga­tions go ahead.

“We don’t know exactly how many com­put­ers were lost or whether per­sonal infor­ma­tion was com­pro­mised,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-​Va.), who chairs the House Gov­ern­ment Reform Com­mit­tee and attended the brief­ing.
“The sec­re­tary has assured me that get­ting that infor­ma­tion is pri­or­ity num­ber one, and I’m con­fi­dent he’ll get his arms around the prob­lem.”  

The Depart­ment of Commerce’s Secu­rity Staff stated that 1,137 lap­tops had been stolen, lost or oth­er­wise van­ished since 2001, mostly from the Cen­sus Bureau and the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion.

Of these, 249 con­tained per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion, nearly all from the Cen­sus Bureau. All were password-​protected, a low-​level safe­guard. Only 107 of the com­put­ers were fully encrypted. 

In spite of the amount of stolen lap­tops, it seems that the vul­ner­a­bil­ity for data mis­use is low, but con­sid­er­ing that this last state­ment was released by Com­merce Sec­re­tary –who, accord­ing to unof­fi­cial sources, spent a whole meet­ing with other mem­bers of the con­gress try­ing to min­i­mize what have hap­pened– we can do with­out feel­ing a lit­tle be sym­pa­thetic with peo­ple whose data were on the stolen laptops.