security - technical definition

Security breaches occur daily, with some of them making media headlines and embarrassing the targeted companies or agencies. On January 30, 2005, for example, a security incident occurred that brought considerable embarrassment to the Dutch armed forces. About 75 pages of highly classified documents about human traffickers from the computers of the Dutch Royal Marechaussee (the armed forces contingency that guards the Dutch borders) somehow found their way to the controversial weblog Geen Stijl (meaning “No Style”).

The conjecture is that a Dutch armed forces staffer worked on the documents at home and unwittingly shared the contents of his computer’s hard drive to numerous others when he logged onto KaZaA—which is unsecure.

This was not the first time that the Dutch have made media headlines over computer security issues. In 2004, the Dutch public prosecutor’s office was equally embarrassed after it was publicized that the prosecutor threw his old PC into the trash, making available for public scrutiny his hard drive with hundreds of pages of classified data on high-profile Dutch crimes—as well as his own credit card numbers and personal tax file information. As a result, the prosecutor resigned from his job.

See Also: Harm to Property.