The Mississippi National Guard this week is in the process of notifying thousands of members that their names, Social Security numbers and other personal information was posted on a public-facing website for more than a month.
As eSecurity Planet reports, this latest security miscue highlights how an innocent mistake can have enormous consequences in the digital age.
“Information management is working feverishly to get to the bottom of it,” Col. Tim Powell, the National Guard spokesman, said in a statement. “We take this very seriously and are incorporating numerous layers of Internet security on our website.”
For more than month, the most sensitive personal information of nearly 3,000 members of the Mississippi National Guard was accidentally posted to the brigade’s Microsoft SharePoint website, exposing their names, Social Security numbers, home and cell phone numbers to anyone with a browser.
A spokesman for the 155th Brigade Combat Team said the administrative records were somehow uploaded to the website on Sept. 10. The data was compiled between 2006 and 2008, including periods during which members of the unit were deployed in Iraq.
