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secure network transfers
Submitted by Niall Litchfield on Fri, 11/23/2007 - 07:36.An ironic update to yesterdays story about the loss of sensitive data in the UK. My wife who is in the middle of changing her employment status had enquired of HMRC about assistance that they might give to sole traders and small businesses. We got a letter today with some incorrect assertions about her tax status from a lady at our local office. The email address listed was a .gsi.gov.uk address or government secure intranet
From the 2004 press release about the then latest gsi investment
The £40 million new Government Secure Intranet (GSi) has gone live, linking over 140 local and central government departments with over 280,000 users. There are over a million potential users, if & when the GSi is linked to the Criminal Justice Network, the NHS Network and the MOD. It'll be a fundamental backbone for e-Government in the UK for the next few years.
The new GSi, provided by Energis, will enable all central and local Government departments and public sector organisations to communicate quickly, easily and securely.
Hugh Barrett, chief executive, OGCbuying.solutions, said: "The new Energis GSi represents a step change in technology, with the capacity to transform the way government communicates. The new contract, which is available to central civil government and the wider public sector, as well as government suppliers, has the potential to finally deliver joined-up government in a way not previously possible."
So HMRC already have access to a secure internal intergovernmental network, and indeed are advertising it as the method to contact them. They chose however to transmit the sensitive data by CD and Courier.
Hey Dude - that's my data
Submitted by Niall Litchfield on Wed, 11/21/2007 - 15:40.As everyone living in the UK should be aware there has been a serious error in data protection involving the UK Tax Authority , the auditor of UK Central Government as well as a private courier firm. In summary
- The auditor asked for a dump from the UK Child Benefit database. It's unclear whether this was a valid request or not.
- The data was dumped and recorded onto two disks.
- The disks were then sent through the outsourced postal operation. This should never have happened.
- The data never arrived.
- The disks were resent this time recorded delivery.
- The data lost and potentially in the wild includes social security details, dates of birth, names , addresses, bank details and so on for 25 million individuals (including my family).
It seems highly likely to me that the "Junior Official" involved was a DBA, though perhaps a systems administrator was involved.
There has been, and no doubt will continue to be, a significant discussion around the appropriate procedures and technologies in use. Oracle might for example cite their Secure Backup product. The relevant junior minister last night spoke on National radio and played down concerns about our proposed national ID Card on the grounds that it was newer technology and so would not suffer the same problem.
For me though the technology is really rather irrelevant - security here is a people issue. There appear to have been a number of people failings
- First, how does any auditor justify asking for sensitive data on CD.
- Second, what management instructions were given to the official concerned ("co-operate with the auditors" seems to me to be the most likely)
- Third, how does any it professional with access to sensitive data consider burning it to CD and sending it through the post.
It doesn't encourage me that the minister apparently believes both that people won't make mistakes with ID data or that it is OK to go on record as saying that the Child Benefit data is stored on an outdated and inherently insecure system. The first is certainly untrue and one would hope that the second was equally untrue.
Challenge
Submitted by Niall Litchfield on Tue, 11/13/2007 - 14:57.Part 3 of the series coming soon - honest guv. Maybe today even. Anyway since it seems to be the season for challenges (or here or here) here is one I posed on Oracle-l in a rather meandering response to a question about scalability.
show me a serious stateless web app - i.e. one which really works with no persistence at all (the acid test is does it run unchanged with no loss of functionality on any browser with cookies disabled). I have yet to see one, seriously. I don't see how there could actually be one, you must interact with the user session in any serious application
The kicker of course is that if you can't do proper apps without state then you pretty much are going to be dependent on an RDBMS for any serious app.
