3,400 national guard members got a nasty surprise. All their personal data has just been stolen. “You name it, it was on there,” announced the National Guard’s Lt. Col. Stephanie Dowling.

A USB flash drive containing the data was in the car of guardsman travelling on official business. The car was broken into as part of a string of routine car burglaries near Lake Forest Drive, a Boise newspaper reported. And the drive contained information on every single guardsman from the state of Idaho.

“Any time our soldiers’ personal data get compromised in any way, it’s a big concern for us,” Dowling acknowledged.

Tuesday the National Guard activated their emergency phone tree for disasters. But this time the message was informing the soldiers to watch for identity thieves. “We want to make sure that all of our soldiers are informed and protect themselves,” Dowling told the Associated Press.

It’s not the first time sensitive data has been left in the back of a car. Earlier this summer a 22-year-old intern in Ohio lost over 800,000 social security numbers — more than 7% of the population of the entire state. Now members of the National Guard expressed varying degrees of dismay.

One Guardsman dealing with a busy schedule called the added problem “a lot to deal with it.” But another Guardsman told the Associated Press the incident pointed to the larger picture.

“It’s a matter of how we fail to safeguard our technology assets,” he told reporters. And when he heard the news of the major security breach, he found it “a little shocking that that kind of stuff would not be kept under closer, or more immediate, control.”

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Entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 11:27 am under Security.

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