Another story came across the net this weekend. It seems that backup tapes containing around 2 Million medical records and various other records went missing. According to the article:

The stolen backup tapes hold names, addresses, Social Security numbers and health information all patients at university medical facilities since Jan. 1, 1999. Financial data from approximately 47,000 people may be on the missing tapes, said Mendendez. Each potential victim has been contacted by the school, she said.

It has happened again. Iron Mountain lost a backup tape that contained credit cards and social security numbers of clients for JC Penney and about 229 other vendors. The total loss is 650,000 credit cards and 150,000 social security numbers according to the IDG News Service.

In an interesting turn of events, Apple's .mac iDisk service has included a security flaw for some time now. It seems that the web interface for the iDisk service does not include a log off button, so anyone wanting to clear the browser of their login credentials must close the browser. Unfortunately, that does not actually fix the problem because anyone can re-open the browser and search through the browser cache to get access to the person's iDisk.

Many businesses out there are backing up their data onto tape, optical media or hard drive without first encrypting their data. Why? The simple fact is that encryption is not easy to setup and unless it is included with the backup product most businesses won't ever implement it.