Via Washington Post -
Social Security numbers and other personal information for as many as 2.2 million U.S. military personnel -- including nearly 80 percent of the active-duty force -- were among the data stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs analyst last month, federal officials said yesterday, raising concerns about national security as well as identity theft.
The department announced that personal data for as many as 1.1 million active-duty military personnel, 430,000 National Guard members and 645,000 reserve members may have been included on an electronic file stolen May 3 from a department employee's house in Aspen Hill. The data include names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, VA spokesman Matt Burns said.
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If you need a login, just roll over to BugMeNot and grab one. Very scary.
A friend at work suggested a very interesting idea to me today. What if we turned this whole thing 180 degrees and just made all the information public? It would force companies to use real authentication and credentials while at the same time, make all this stolen information useless to the bad guys.
This idea sounds good, but it would be very very costly to put into place and wouldn't be accepted by the public at large any time soon. We have pushed and pushed for general public to protect and guard their information. For the security world to all the sudden turn around and say "nevermind", would be a complete shock and we might do more damage in the end.
But with all the databases in the word that collect information, we are almost to the totally public information level anyways....
Just an idea...
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