The verdict is in for some employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here's the body count: 5 fired, 18 reprimanded/demoted. All this over a few hard drives. The article never mentions whether or not the drives were recovered. What or who is to blame? Well, the government has assigned its blame to the individuals involved. I suspect it was more of a break down in process and inventory management. If the Los Alamos had employed technology that encrypts data-at-rest with a sophisticated recovery mechanism and NSA approved algorithms this would not have been such a big deal. The data on the drives would have been inaccessible to someone without multiple recovery keys and knowledge of the specific encryption technology employed. This scandal deftly highlights the importance of storage security.
This weekend I'm going to be putting together a comparison chart of the HP XP12000 versus the DMX-3000. This won't be a full feature comparison, but just a side by side view of the vendor's published material plus a little bit of editorial thrown in for good measure. This came out of a conversation with a colleague of mine. This should prove very interesting.
