Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust Document Breach

A reminder: data security involves more than people stealing stuff from your computers and hard disks.  Paper–that noble tree-based parchment–can be a source of information security weaknesses as well.  Problem is there can be only so many ways of securing such information:

• Lock it up
• Shred it to bits (and I mean to bits.  Bits so tiny they’re really powder-like)

Short of these two, there is no way to secure the information printed on paper.  Computers, for example, have a third option, besides locking it up and destroying it: encryption products like TrueCrypt.

Granted, encryption works on written records as well.  However, encrypting it and decrypting it would take significantly longer time.

Why do I mention such an obvious thing?  Papworth NHS had a breach of the most unusual kind.  A gift it was not.

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