Identities of 5000 British prison workers at risk, after hard disk lost

Last month I blogged about how a USB drive had been lost containing confidential data about every prisoner in England and Wales.

There is now uproar in the British media as it has been revealed that a 500GB portable hard drive, containing the names, dates of birth and National Insurance numbers of 5000 prison guards and jail governors has been lost.

Tabloid newspaper “The News of the World”, who broke the story, was contacted by a whistleblower who revealed that the disk had been in the care of IT firm EDS since July 2007, but was only discovered to be missing two months ago.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who was told of the missing data yesterday by the newspaper, says he is ordering an urgent inquiry into the data loss….

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.