US (BLOGGER) ARTICLE ON INFORMATION SECURITY Executive Advisory Program

September 08, 2008

Information Security – The Data Clone Wars

Posted by: Ken Anderson

When most people hear about a security breach, they picture a hacker spending countless hours in front of sophisticated computer systems finding ways to obtain our most precious secrets. As we know from popular movies, hackers attack their prey with the use of expensive hardware, high speed internet, special computing algorithms, personal skill, illegal tactics, and knowledge of their victims. So when Bank of New York Mellon announced last Thursday that a recent security breach reached 8 million more individuals than originally reported, I thought these must have been some smart hackers.

Turns out the security breach wasn’t hackers attacking their security fortress or compromising the work of their security professionals, it was the discovery of some back-up data storage tapes gone missing. WOW… All that work on security and someone misplaces the backup tapes. While it should be mentioned that there is no evidence the rogue tap data had been accessed or misused, it demonstrates a security hole the size of Montana – cloned data.

Yes, cloned data; not the original, or “live,” data but data stored, transported, or used away from the system of record. There are several examples: Google was in the news when thieves stole computers containing employee records used by Colt Express Outsourcing Services of California. In 2005, the FBI reported losing at least 10 laptop computers containing classified information during a four-year period and recent study by Dell Inc. reported thousands of laptops are lost in US airports each year.

Shortly after advances in technology gave us mobility, provided a market for outsourced partners, and the ability to store massive amounts of data on very small devices, cloned data became a security issue and will continue to be a problem for years to come.

But what about the next wave of technology? Virtualized everything, software-as-a-service, and moving to a computer cloud – “Then begun, this Data Clone War has.”