Data Breach at Georgetown University

In what constitutes an inexcusable breach of trust and security, GU reported to its students and faculty that nearly 38,000 people have had their personal data exposed.
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=31245

Apparently a sensitive hard disk was stolen - with the disk containing UNENCRYPTED information (SS numbers, names etc) of many thousands of students and faculty. I cannot imagine how such a prestigious institution could let such a thing happen.

Does security begin and stop with/at the ethernet cable?!!

Physical security is as important as network/digital security. For anyone to minimize the value or importance of one over the other is beyond ludicrous. GU is offering to pay for one year's worth of credit monitoring, but what about after that? The govt should mandate a MINIMUM of 5 years' worth of credit monitoring for each such incident, plus total insurance covering at least 5 times the total of the existing credit limit of all of the current credit cards owned by the affected people.

Further to that, the govt, which seems to have absolutely no take on such issues, needs to get off its lazy behind and do something meaningful, like legislating strong penalties for careless and negligent organizations.

I've repeated such thoughts ad nauseam and probably will continue to do so until such events become a thing of the past. At the rate things are going vis-a-vis data theft, it's going to be a VERY long time before we can stop worrying about such horrible incidents of violation of our trust and safety.

Be safe!