Information Security and Passport Breach of Obama, Clinton, McCain’s data and Offshoring..
Before you jump the gun, this blog entry is not about American politics or its leaders. :-) I came across this interesting writeup in informationweek.com analyzing the system and technology view, focused on how “Obama, Clinton, McCain Passport Breaches Expose Human, Not Tech Weakness.” The article begins by stating how the unauthorized access was caught by a monitoring system that was tripped when three State Department contractors accessed the electronic records.
Reading about this incident, I began reflecting on my experience with IT in the Government and the security policies and checks-and-balances inherent to managing such systems.
In my past life before I joined Infosys, I did a year long stint working with the State of Kentucky’s Department of Information Systems (DIS) working on their Income Tax management systems at Frankfort, Ky. This was over a decade ago, and as I recall, issues regarding data privacy, especially as it pertained to taxpayer’s information was taken very seriously with Chinese Walls between the different development teams, production support and users. In this instance, the ‘users,’ were state employees who had access to view customer/taxpayer data. Those of us in the IT development group had no access to live databases and systems, and even the data used for testing and validations was masked.
The aspects of security breach and inappropriate data access as highlighted by the recent incident are certainly going to have far reaching consequences, impacting those of us in the corporate world too. And if there is a discussion of IT security, can offshoring dimensions be far behind? I had briefly analyzed a few thoughts around “Security and Offshoring IT” in my blog a while ago and continue to reflect on the topic.
Bottomline: As the old adage goes, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Security breaches like that exposed by the recent incident should make us reflect on the Human and Technology aspects of securing data, and systems.
