Vet's info stolen

Whom would be allowed to take home a laptop with the personal records of 26 or 28 million in the first place? Kind've a lot like one of "the" three laptops with our nuke secrets that came up missing five or six years ago. How, and who?

Mark

Mark

• Vet Link

Even bad boys are just as good as they can be

Mark

I graduated in '92 from UConn and a regular part of the check-out process at the bookstore was to give your student ID (SSN) out loud for the clerk to key in so you'd get your co-op check at the end of the year.

It's absolutely ridiculous how many places use the SSN as an ID; and it's absolutely ridiculous how many organizations don't even exercise a modicum of common (computer) sense to take basic precautions to secure information like SSN, Financial Card information, etc.

This doesn't need an act of congress, just basic common sense that the easy way isn't always the right way.

One, you have no, zero need for 24 million records. Maybe you grab a 1,000; 10,000...something big enough to representative. You shouldn't need the whole data set.

Two, you run sensitive information through some simple transformation -- make all the SSNs something like 111-11-1111; maybe increment each by 1 if you really need them to be unique.

Three, most if not all "homework" should just be how you write the formula to get the answer. You then take that formula (query, program -- whatever you want to call it) back to the office to run against the real data. Or you run it remotely which I've done plenty (prototype at home, then dial in to the office to actually run the report).

If you can't tell, it just really, really annoys me to hear of stupid losses of data like this.