New Jersey Hard Drive Data Security Breach A Reminder to Us All
11 March 2011
When the State of New Jersey was preparing to put a bunch of old computer equpiment up for auction to the public, it didn’t realize it was about to auction off the private data of members of that public. State Comptroller Matthew Boxer was reviewing the sale of hundreds of computers that is a usual occurrence in the state office when he discovered that the “hard drives in 79% of the machines had tons of private data on them” still! The sale was stopped thanks to the auditor’s investigation, but there is little doubt that the state had already been selling computers with confidential data on them for some time.