Most Veterans Administration Data Breaches From Paper Documents Not PCs

CowboyRobot writes "'Between 96 and 98 percent of our [data breach] incidents — it varies from month to month — deal with physical paper where people are not thinking about the fact that that piece of paper they're carrying around making benefits determinations has sensitive information and they need to protect it,' said Stephen Warren, VA acting assistant secretary for information and technology. 'If you consider the fact the VA has about 440,000 people that we service and that the department over 900,000 devices on the network, [a data breach count relating to IT assets] of somewhere between one and 10 in a month is pretty good,' Warren said. 'And many of those are things disappearing in inventory. Many are found subsequently because they got moved somewhere.'"

Physical breaches of security

[matria]

Indeed. Some years ago I worked in the medical records (excuse me... Health Information Services) department of a clinic with the University of Miami. More than once I saw a doctor leaving the building on his way home with a bag full of medical records. This was quite illegal. And, of course, our department got blamed when the patient came in and his records could not be found.

Re:What on earth are they printing?

[davester666]

Welcome to gov't bureaucracy. You must be new to this planet.

I think you are misreading the 440,000

[DigitalReverend]

The 440,000 would be employees and volunteers of the VA. The VA itself actually handles a lot more than that. There's 21.5 million veterans, of that 3.5 million receives disability compensation. Every veteran is eligible for health care in the VA system. So for 444,000 users of the VA information technology, 900,000 devices isn't that far fetched to handle the date for 3.5 million + veterans.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/veteranscensus1.html [infoplease.com]
http://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_department_of_veterans_affairs.pdf [va.gov]