Comments on: VA Will Pay $20 Million to Settle Stolen Laptop Lawsuits

By: Dan Green

Dan Green — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:16:53 +0000

On its face, $20M seems like a lot of money; however, when you look at the totality of the class, it is way underfunded. The settlement paperwork claims each person will recieve “at least $75″ but that is not true. There are 26.5M potential class victims. You need to subtract the lawyers fee of $5M and the $18,000 for the original claimants, which leaves $14.98M. If only ten percent of the class makes claims (which is extremely low) that is 2.65M claims. If you divide $14.98M by 2.65M, you get $5.65. What a joke!

By: flip2006

flip2006 — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:30:28 +0000

I have used Trucrypt for over a year and it’s great. I used Folder Lock and others before but TC is best…and it’s free! Folder Lock is junk and costs $25.

By: Michael Christopher

Michael Christopher — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:13:40 +0000

I can’t argue with that, Todd, and I wish the settlement had gone differently. This is a big settlement in this area, and it may make an impact. Better that the VA had spent a million or two on security measures and training, of course, and better that the courts punish sloppy retailers as much as they seem to want to punish the VA. Better still… In the Old West they didn’t try to install power locks on palominos, they hanged horse thieves. Let’s have some severe prosecutions of hackers and identity theives. Maybe it would just be a deterent, but it would sure feel good!

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:02:08 +0000

Michael, that $20MM is your money. Are you sure your payment fits the crime? There are stories abound of companies being hacked and credit cards and social security numbers stolen… with no penalties to the company (the harmful publicity may be enough). Are you sure you want your own Veteran’s Administration to be the poster child for using good security tools instead of TJ Max?

By: Michael Christopher

Michael Christopher — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:25:17 +0000

TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org). What we like about it is that it handles it all on the fly. Just have to login to an encrypted volume, then the files on it behave exactly as though they were unencrypted. You can hide a nested volume within a visible one and it can’t be seen by anyone, even when the outer volume is open; it opens with a separate password (thus the plausible deniability) when logging in to the outer volume.