Another day, another public sector data breach. Last month the ICO fined Greater Manchester Police £120,000 for the loss of a USB stick. The month before, the Scottish Borders Council was slapped with a £250,000 fine over dumped records.

Just last week the Information Commissioner’s Office revealed that it had fined public sector organisations over £2m in the last 18 months. It seems like we can’t get through a single month without a public sector body suffering a hefty fine over a data security blunder.

Rethinking information security

Basic lessons on information security are simply not being headed. While some public sector organisations are implementing sensible security policies and encrypting sensitive data, many are not. By now, we should have realised how a perimeter-based approach to security based on firewalls and defensive controls around the IT network is no longer sufficient when threats can come from within as well as outside.

It is high time a great many government organisations rethink their approach to information security by taking care to protect and classify data according to the sensitivity of that information.

Classifying data

To describe an overall strong security posture, we might use the term ‘End-to-end information security’. However, it is imperative that the public sector takes consideration of the status of different types of data so that an organisation is adequately protected. Data can be categorised in the following three ways for this purpose:



The inactive data which is physically stored in databases, spreadsheets, data warehouses, mobile devices and the like, can be referred to as ‘data at rest’. For the public sector, think patient records stored in NHS databases, or information from drug investigations on unencrypted USB sticks (as Manchester police got stung for).

The loss of such data might result in embarrassment, discrimination in the workplace or even the threat of physical danger for the persons concerned. From an information security viewpoint, data at rest is vulnerable and needs to be protected.

Public sector organisations should take the utmost care that sensitive data such as personal records is protected against brute force attacks with strong encryption for when basic authentication methods like username plus password fails.

Data which is transferred between two nodes in a network is ‘data in transit’. Examples of sensitive public sector data in transit might include confidential emails or video messages being transmitted from one computer to another, which could divulge government secrets; tax returns sent electronically which could result in theft; or even missile codes being sent from HQ to a nuclear submarine.