Publicly Available Social Security Numbers

I posted earlier about how Alaska's Department of Revenue accidentally deleted it's applicant database. Today I heard of another major government muck-up in the US. Not that government's elsewhere don't make major IT mistakes, but when it's done in the US, it's usually in large proportions. How large are we talking about? 63,000. According to this news article on the Washington Post website titled "US Exposed Personal Data", the Census Bureau has had the social security numbers of 63,000 people posted on a publicly accessible website for over a decade. This breach of security and privacy was only discovered when a farmer was bored and decided to do a search on her name. How do things like this happen? What happened to things like audits? Government agencies were not known to be on the cutting edge of technology. Most older generation managers tended to disregard the importance of the digital in the digital age. I've heard it also being said that 9/11 could have been averted if the FBI had a more integrated system in place. Data integrity and data security are serious issues in this day and age. Applications are going online. Databases are becoming distributed. Documents are stored and edited online. Even online operating systems are in the works. All this means that our data will be as vulnerable as ever if we don't take the necessary precautions. If you do a little bit of research on Google hacking, you will be surprised at the type of things you can find with a little bit of googling. Anyways, having said all this, it's not doomsday yet. There are simple safeguards you can take to protect your data. I will be posting up things you can do to improve the security of your data in the following weeks. So stay tuned.