posted on June 13, 2006 05:47:09 PM new
I received this letter from the Secretary of Veterans Affairs yesterday. May be potential impact on postal rates. 26,500,000 pieces of first class mail at 39¢ each comes out to $10,335,000.00. BUT you know they got special rates. still a lot of money inflow into Post office. Now maybe they won't raise the rates. LOL yeah right.
Hope these are not too big and are readable scans.
**************
I married my wife for her looks...but not the
ones she's been giving me lately!
posted on June 13, 2006 06:38:10 PM new
I like their answer to question #7. Everyone has to attend a class on security awareness. What they need to do is locate the idiot responsible for security and fire him, along with anyone else in the department who was aware of the violations but failed to report them. There is no way the data on that many people should have ever been on moveable media. It should have been on a mainframe server, not connected to the outside world, and should have only been available to authorized employees inside the building on a local network. Anyone in a distant field office could have accessed it by requesting specific info in smaller packets and have it retrieved by an authorized person and transmitted to them. They really need to overhaul their security system from top to bottom, and hire a competent security administrator.
If Murphy's law is correct, everything East of the San Andreas Fault will slide into the Atlantic
posted on June 13, 2006 06:48:19 PM new
They could at least have addressed it to Dear Irked at least. LOL #7 making them take classes is kinda funny with all that long name they give it to make it sound real official when they could have just named it Dumbass Class.
**************
I married my wife for her looks...but not the
ones she's been giving me lately!
posted on June 13, 2006 07:17:11 PM new
When I first heard about this on the news, my first thought was that someone could have paid that employee to bring his computer home so it could be stolen.
posted on June 13, 2006 07:43:08 PM new
We received ours yesterday as well.
The real down side to this story is that the "employee" was not a government employee. It was a contractor working for AD Anderson. Contractors have almost no liability for instances such as these, so the VA will be paying for the damage control.
The VA budget is already strained, we (veterans) will be paying for this snafu. I am more concerned about health benefits than the cost of postage right now.
posted on June 13, 2006 07:43:31 PM new
What bothers me the most is the fact that if someone has accessed this information an d is able to use it what will happen to me and everyone else with disability and the affect it could have on my receiving my check every month or if I have to continually monitor the bank as to if it came or not. Someone could use the information and divert those payments even if just one time they could cause real damage. Not to mention all the possible military personnel - soldiers that could have their credit ruined.
Hopefully the joker who took it has formated the drive and or better yet threw it away long to be lost in garbage heaven. Plus does not know how to retrieve that information since it was password protected. Not enough security but may thwart a common thief who knows nothing about hacking etc.
I think all PC to do with the government or any with this kind of information on it should have a security program on the PC that will destroy the hard drive with unauthorized access. There are programs out there that will do that and there is also hardware that will essentially destroy a PC or hard drive that is stolen and attempted access to it. Expensive but worth it in these circumstances. I was reading about this just last month but can't remember the co.'s that provide such security. LOL be my luck my pc if I had it would think I was a crook for forgetting some login procedure and self destruct.
**************
I married my wife for her looks...but not the
ones she's been giving me lately!
