TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Navy Probes Data Leak on 100,000 Sailors, Marines

Navy Probes Data Leak on 100,000 Sailors, Marines

Reuters News Wire (reuters@telecom-digest.org)
Fri, 7 Jul 2006 18:33:33 -0500

The Navy said on Friday that it was trying to determine how personal
information on more than 100,000 Navy and Marine Corp aviators and air
crew wound up on a publicly available Web site for more than six
months.

In a fresh case of private information on military personnel being
compromised, the full names and social security numbers of both active
and reserve members appeared on the Naval Safety Center Web site at
http://www.safetycenter.navy.mil last December.

Those affected are believed to include any Navy or Marine Corp aviator
who has served during the past 20 years.

The same information was also disseminated late last year to Navy and
Marine Corps commands on 1,083 program disks mailed out as part of the
service's Web Enabled Safety Program.

The Naval Safety Center found out about the problem and removed the
information from the web site on Thursday, a week after the recovery
of a stolen Veterans Affairs Department laptop that contained
sensitive information on more than 26 million U.S. military veterans
and service members.

The center is now recalling the mailed program disks.

As in the case of the Veterans Affairs laptop, the Navy said there was
no evidence that any of the disseminated data has been used illegally.

But the service is notifying those affected by mail and setting up a
24-hour call center to handle queries.

Safety center spokeswoman Evelyn Odango said the problem appeared to
be an errant file.

"The information was inadvertently included in a file that was then
posted on the Web," she said. "We found out about it through a Web
site user and it was removed immediately."

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.

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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is this getting to be a bad joke, or
what? Every day or three of late we hear of files which should remain
totally private and confidential somehow making their way into the
public's view, mostly because of thievery of laptops, but now in this
instance, by being put on display on the web. And I suspect if we
used our imaginations, with all sorts of number combinations we could
find even more stuff on the web which should ideally _not_ be on
display. PAT]

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