In just the past couple of years, vast numbers of Canadians have been told their personal information has been stolen or lost, with the resultant possibility of identity theft.
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More citizen’s personal data stolen from government agency

It’s another case of personal information being lost of stolen from government computers.

The latest is the theft of a government computer from a car in St John, in the eastern maritime province of New Brunswick

The laptop contained the personal financial information, names, birth dates, social insurance numbers, and addresses of 92 people has been stolen.

Tyler Campbell,  is a communications officer with the Department of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour (PETL).

The department collects the relevant private information of New Brunswickers accessing the self employment benefit program through Southwest Community Business Development Corp. The laptop was in the possession of a CBDC Southwest employee.

Campbell says, “The person who stole it would have had to get through the first screen, the lock screen, Microsoft password, and then figure out how to get into the database, which is also password protected”.

Real concerns over identity theft.

Travis Barlow, the Halifax-based head of the Atlantic Security Conference, AltSecCon says you should simply never leave a computer with delicate information in a car overnight, whether it’s in sight or not.  “It’s a no-brainer,” he says.

Barlow said the laptop and database passwords could be easily bypassed by someone looking for data to sell.

“There’s a fantastic black market for any — that data can be used to create credit cards, mortgages, whatever to create a false identity,” he says. “This information sells very rapidly on the internet underground and moves very quickly. Once it’s out there, there’s not very much you can do at that point.”

  • In just the past couple of years there have been several cases of lost or stolen personal data.  Below is a partial list.

  •  In Ontario in March of this year, the medical records for thousands of patients at Etobicoke General Hospital in the greater Toronto area, could be in the wrong hands following the theft of a laptop.The personal details of 5,500 patients — including names, dates of birth and diagnostic reports — were on a laptop that was stolen in mid-January from a lab used to test brain activity.  The lab was locked but the laptop was not password-protected — contrary to hospital policy according to Ann Ford, chief privacy officer for William Osler Health System.

  • Last September, a laptop containing the names, dates of birth, provincial health card numbers, billing codes and diagnostic codes of some 620,000 Albertans who visited Alberta Medicentres was stolen.

  • In July last year, a hard drive with dat on over 580,000 Canadians who took out student loans could not be found at the federal agency, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.  The missing files include student names, social insurance numbers, dates of birth, contact information and loan balances of borrowers, as well as the personal contact information of 250 department employees.

  • In 2012, that same agency reported a USB key (flash drive/memory stick) containing personal information on about 5,000 Canadians was reported missing.

  • Also in 2012, the Ontario government  agency Elections Ontario reported two USB keys containing names, addresses, genders, birth dates and whether an elector voted in the last election — as well as any other personal information updates provided by electors — vanished at the end of April

  • In 2013,  seven employees at the British Columbia Ministry of Health were fired or suspended for allegedly passing the personal health records of millions of British Columbians to contracted researchers on unencrypted computer memory sticks and flash drives.

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