The police in Maitland, Florida are investigating the theft of a computer from an office for the Department of Revenue. A brick was thrown through an office window on Monday morning, triggering an alarm that summoned the cops. Thankfully, the computer featured data encryption, so concerns regarding the data breach are minimal, for the moment.
There is the question of what the thief or thieves were after, though. While most are reporting the theft of a computer, Fox35 is reporting that the thief made off with the “computer’s hard drive.” If the latter is true, the Department of Revenue may be facing a premeditated information theft. I mean, with alarms blaring, one would have to be a really cool customer to unscrew a computer open to pop out the hard drive.
For those not aware, the hard drive, or hard disk, is the part of the computer where data is stored. For desktop computers, it’s about the size of a small paperback book (and half that size for laptop computers), and weighs very little. If one were after the data on a computer, this would be the component to steal. Regardless of what was actually stolen, the good news is that the data was encrypted.
The use of encryption software like hard drive encryption or file encryption from AlertBoot, ensures that the information stays secret unless ones has the correct passwords to access the data. Assuming the enduser didn’t have a sticky note around the computer’s vicinity, it seems safe to say that the Department of Revenue is out only a couple of thousand dollars. This is a good thing, considering the alternative: were encryption not used, the department would probably have to spend ten times as much, at least, in order to rectify the situation -- first off, by contacting those affected by the data breach, possibly followed by promises of credit monitoring for one year.
That’s assuming sensitive or personally identifiable information was stored on the stolen device (and this being the Department of Revenue, I’d say the chances of it are strong). The actual user of the computer is on vacation, so police have no idea what further consequences there may be. Not even the office manager, who pointed out the data was encrypted, knew whether there was sensitive information on the disk. (I take it that means full disk encryption was used, since that type of encryption software ensures any data on the hard disk is protected).
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