By Andy McCue, 31 October 2006 16:20
NEWS
Computer security breaches at a number of central government departments in the last year have led to confidential database records being compromised, silicon.com can reveal.
Two of the departments that have been hit by security breaches include the Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) and the Department for Transport (DfT).
The DfT has admitted that eight security breaches of databases controlled by the department and its agencies have been committed by the department's staff over the last five years, resulting in a total of 96 records being compromised. In 2006 alone two breaches have occurred with 40 records being compromised.
But transport minister Gillian Merron said there have been "no confirmed security breaches from external sources".
DCA minister Vera Baird also confirmed an incident took place in her department in July this year - although it was the first since 2001 - and that it is still under investigation.
She said in response to a parliamentary question from Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson: "The information was compromised when IT equipment was stolen from departmental accommodation."
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A spokeswoman for the DCA told silicon.com: "The DCA is conducting an investigation with the police and those enquiries are still ongoing."
The Department for Education and Skills said it has detected only one case of computer hacking over the past five years, which happened in 2005. It did not say how many records had been compromised by that breach.
Other government departments that have claimed there have been no security breaches of their databases over the past five years include the Cabinet Office; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; the Department for International Development; and the Treasury.
No-one at the DfT was available for comment.
Comments
There are 5 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
but of course this cannot happen to the ID card database, which as we all know is perfect despite any misleading information we may have seen to the contrary, so we don't need to worry do we
2. anonymous
why are we not surprised? the money this lot of idiots waste is unbelievable.
No wonder they want to charge green taxes they have to raise extra revenue somewhere.
3. Simon
Are we really to believe that the other departments had no incidents ? Not even a lost laptop ?
Or have they simply managed to prevent news leaking out ?
4. Norman J Cesar
Is this really that news worthy, 96 compromised records in 5 years? What sort of percentage of the total records is that?
Granted a security breach is not good news but taken into context it's not a massive breach? How much did the breaches cost? What lessons have been learnt, I'd like to hear what the DfT have to say about it.
I agree with Karen Challinor that the ID cards scheme is a bad idea but this story doesn't prove it. If the ID Cards scheme only had 96 compromised records in 5 years then that would be quite a good result bearing in mind that there will be over 60 million records!
5. Karen Challinor
Mr Cesar
you forgot
...and 96 lives that will have been ruined by the leakage of this information, still good odds that you won't be one of them eh, comparable to winning the lottery even, only not so pleasant
so you feel there is an acceptable leakage rate for the data in the ID card database do you ?
well my figure is 0% leakage over the lifetime of the database and if this cannot be achieved and maintained then the scheme should be scrapped, what is yours ? how many lives ruined will you accept over a given period of time before you start to think it might not have been such a good idea in the first place ?