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Gov.-Contracted Cybersecurity Firm Breached
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2009-02-05
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News of serious data breach at SRA International was likely drowned out by the US Presidential inauguration. The same day Heartland Systems announced the largest data breach in history, affecting millions of credit card numbers, SRA announced the discovery of a virus on its network.
 | | Gov.-Contracted Cybersecurity Firm Breached |  |
What makes that especially embarrassing-and especially troubling-is SRA is an IT security company employed by the US Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the National Guard.
The company officially acknowledged the breach via letter to its employees, who seem to be the parties affected. SRA said the personnel data compromised included personal information like name, address, birthday, health information, social security number, benefit dependents, and possibly personal data included in security position questionnaires. The company offered, as appears standard, free credit monitoring services.
Hopefully, the breach was limited to employees and does not extend to sensitive information protected on behalf of the government, which is constantly bombarded by attempted hacks. In light of the Patriot Act area, who knows what citizen data could be targeted and used for ill?
Graham Cluley at Sophos asks the most pressing question: "Why wasn't this sensitive data encrypted? If it had been securely encrypted then even if malware and hackers had gained access to the same drive as the confidential information, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it."
The company didn't know if any of the information had been extracted or used, but it's reasonable to assume if there was a hole within its own network, there are possibly other exploitable vulnerabilities with unencrypted data. Likely the government-contracted cybersecurity company is looking into this encryption idea.
About the Author:
SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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