Thursday, May 12, 2011

Woman up

Quit ducking responsibility for this.

Fix it and help folks whose data is misused; and

Don't do it again.


Emails show comptroller knew she was at fault
By Patricia Kilday Hart - Houston Chronicle

AUSTIN — In the weeks following the discovery that Comptroller Susan Combs' office inadvertently left exposed on an Internet server the private information of 3.5 million Texans for more than a year, officials at three state agencies felt she unfairly blamed them for the blunder, according to emails obtained by the Houston Chronicle.

Officials at the Teacher Retirement System, the Texas Workforce Commission and the Employee Retirement System chafed at Combs' insistence that their agencies had erred in not sending the data in encrypted form.

The emails indicate officials at all three agencies independently concluded they'd properly sent the files over a secure network that encrypts data while it is in transmission, and that the problem had occurred because Combs' office improperly put the data on a server vulnerable to a security breach.