Backup tapes containing 2 million records of patients were stolen from a car, which was transporting the tapes on 2nd June 2008. The company who were storing and transporting the tapes was Perpetual Storage.
While the was being transported by Perpetual Storage, they can not be held 100% responsible for the data loss. If the data had been encrypted this would never have been an issue.
Lorris Betz, senior vice-president for Health Sciences and CEO of University of Utah Health & Clinics, said in a posted alert that it was unlikely that any information on the backup tapes will be exposed to thieves.
A similar comment was made by Medicare when their backup tapes were stolen in the UK. When are the medical companies going to understand, just because its on a backup tape it does not mean to say that it can not extracted, relatively easily, and even if it can’t employing a tape restoration company well get the job done for around £200. Even if the staff who control data movements did not know this, surely the fact that thieves are targeting backup tapes must indicate to them that they have a method of extracting the data?
Article on TechWorld