This is rather frightening. At an Afghan bazaar a CNN reporter was able to purchase USB drives…with data on them! Normally one would say ‘yeah, so what’. Well it just so happens that the drives in question were stolen by Afghan workers from the Bagram US airbase. The shop keeper in the article explained that he ould care less about the data he’s just interested in selling the USB drives. The data in question even included social security numbers for some soldiers stationed at Bagram. This is a major physical security failure for the Bagram base and has launched an American military probe.
“They were all stolen from offices inside the base by the Afghans working there,” he said. “I get them all the time.”
About 2,000 Afghans are employed as cleaners, office staff and laborers at the Bagram base. Though they are searched coming in and out of the base, the flash drives are the size of a finger and can easily be concealed on a body.
I was a little slow on the uptake to write about this article. This type of thing is happening at companies across the globe. E&Y can’t hold on to laptops. What makes you think others are any better at keeing track of USB drives?