Thursday, November 22, 2007

Two more discs missing?

at 11/22/2007 01:24:00 pm

According to the Mail another twop discs are missing from the HMRC offices that never arrived in London. I'm having trouble getting my head round the other bit they've reported which suggests that the password for the discs may have been in the same package.

I actually saw someone making a joke on a security mailing list last night about that and thought "no one would ever be that stupid would they?" I hope the Mail is wrong.


 

4 comments:

zeno said...
22 Nov 2007 13:45:00  

Well, no-one that I'm aware of has asked Darling how the 'code' to access the disks was transmitted to the NAO.

When I heard that the disks had been sent in the post I wondered if they'd written down the 'code' in the covering letter. But then I thought, no: no-one could be that dumb.

I bet I was wrong.

Travis Bickle said...
22 Nov 2007 15:00:00  

Talking of stupidity back in the 1980's I used to work in technical support for a company that set up a distributed system in regional depots. Every installation was documented including the nightly procedure to run a system backup onto the old 5 1/4" diskettes, which should then be filed.

When my colleague went to do a system check in one depot after the first couple of weeks he asked the girl if she had taken the backups and filed them, to which she proudly proclaimed "yes" and showed him the ring binder where the diskettes had been filed, complete with neatly punched holes to fit over the rings...

Thortung said...
23 Nov 2007 03:32:00  

Travis,

I came across a related farce back in the mists of time. The backup 5 1/4" diskettes were to be filed with a label on them giving reference etc. After having no joy at all testing reading any of the backup diskettes, it transpired that the labels were being applied, then the diskettes were being rolled into a manual typewriter to add the backup references...

Shug Niggurath said...
23 Nov 2007 15:43:00  

I would be even less surprised to find that the password was written on the top of the disk in indelible ink...

How many pirate copies of Adobe Photoshop are kicking about with the registration code scrawled over the CD? It's pretty stadnard practice.

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