South Carolina is currently facing an unprecedented data breach that's drawing fire from citizens, and forcing questions about IT governance into the spotlight.
While the rest of the East Coast battled Hurricane Sandy this week, South Carolina's State Department of Revenue acknowledged the theft of tax-related data from 657,000 businesses, and up to 3.6 million individuals.
South Carolina Department of Revenue's website was hacked by a foreign hacker. The hack most likely began on August 27, was discovered on October 10, and was neutralized on October 20. Around 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,999 credit card and debit card numbers were exposed. A total of 16,000 payment card numbers were not encrypted.
The lack of data encryption for the SC data jumped out at nearly everyone with any knowledge of IT, putting South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley on the defensive. At a press conference this week, she said: "The industry standard is most Social Security numbers are not encrypted. A lot of banks don't encrypt. It's very complicated. It's very cumbersome. There's a lot of numbers involved with it."
That stance has drawn criticism from a range of sources, including Internet Evolution 7DEE lecturer Richard Stiennon, founder and chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, who spoke today in "Getting Security Right in the Cloud." Earlier this week, he told Computerworld:
Critical data, especially personally identifiable information, must be protected and Social Security numbers linked to names, ranks at the top
[of the list of items that need to be protected] Encryption technology is readily available for data stores. It is not cumbersome to encrypt data. To the contrary, it is easy to do and most retailers and payment processors do it regularly.
IT pros may ask, "Where was the CIO in all of this?" Oddly, Mike Garon, the former CIO at South Carolina's Department of Revenue, resigned on September 21, a resignation which, according to spokespeople, was not related to the breach.
A note to Mr. Garon received no response prior to publication.
There are several lessons for IT in this story. The main one, of course, is that the cost of security remains more acceptable than the cost of a breach. IT professionals who do not understand this could mysteriously disappear from their posts without a trace.
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