Editor's Corner

Every CIO's nightmare happened to the Idaho Power Company last week when it discovered that old disk drives hadn't been thoroughly cleaned before being tossed. With nearly 500,000 customers, and lots of data stored on drives, you can only imagine the panic and heart palpitations that took place when the mistake was revealed. As an article over at Computerworld relates, the company had decided to recycle a couple of hundred drives to a vendor, which then sold them to third parties. So far 86 have been recovered--which means there are still too many drives out there with confidential information. Not only is the company worried about the impact this will have on customer loyalty, as well as potential damage resulting from the breach, there are those pesky compliance rules that obviously come into play. - Judy