KAILUA-KONA — Marquis ID Systems, which issues state drivers licenses and ID cards, reported Thursday that a system crash in September resulted in the loss of scans of sensitive personal documents that may prove irretrievable.
The “multiple hard disk crash,” as Marquis described it, coincided with a failure of the company’s back-up system and affects roughly 66,500 Hawaii residents. Deanna Sako, director of the Hawaii County Department of Finance, said 9,193 of those residents live on the Big Island.
Materials lost were scanned between Feb. 25 and Sept. 15 of 2017. Driver’s licenses and IDs issued during that period remain valid.
Sako said there was no security breach associated with the Sept. 15 crash and that Hawaii Islanders affected need not fear their personal data falling into the wrong hands. She added officials are hopeful some of the lost data, which includes scanned documents and fingerprint images, may yet be recoverable.
Marquis, the state and individual counties aren’t likely to move onto other remedies until the recovery effort has been exhausted, Sako explained.
“They were able to recover some of the data,” Sako said. “They are planning on issuing something in the mail to (notify those affected). It may not be this week. I think they want to try to retrieve as much data as they can.”
Hawaii County, which Thursday morning was first informed of the data loss, will ask those people whose data proves irretrievable to return to their local Department of Motor Vehicles location with all necessary documents and to redo fingerprinting.
The DMV will issue the new gold star licenses to all the affected, which will be required of every citizen of Hawaii by 2020.
Sako said Hawaii County is examining possibilities to expedite the process for the more than 9,000 Big Islanders who may need to plan an extra trip to the DMV.
“We’re looking at a lot of things, we just haven’t figured out what we’re going to do yet,” she explained. “Maybe having extra hours or maybe having a special day for people to come in and trying to make it as easy as possible for them.”
So, the idea with protecting data is that it exists in at least two places, one set in the main storage system, and a copy in an offsite backup. That’s called “backing up”, which most savvy computer users are well aware of.
Given that obvious general principle, can someone explain how it’s possible to completely lose a massive amount of information? Other than the usual Three Stooges on acid performance we’ve come to expect from this government?
I’ve come to expect this level of incompetence… still, It continues to boggle my mind every time.
A company that handles sensitive data, with no backup… no raid setup for hard drives….? How does that even exist???
Honestly it’s almost impressive that state workers can find companies that are this incompetent to do important tasks… I don’t think I could find a tech company this incompetent if I tried.
Another great example of selling a red herring to people that know less than you do…
What Idiots, or is there something more to this?
Yeah, who cares that you have to spend hours and pay money to get another certified copy of you birth, marriage, divorce, name change, social security info, etc
They were just careless. Proper data storage would have had redundant hard drives, on-site backup storage would have had redundancy, then off-site backup storage would also have had redundancy. That means 6 hard drives failed in 2 locations for this to happen. To all my clients that we manage backups for, don’t worry, we got your covered! Unless the world exploded. But at that point, who cares about computers and drivers licenses?
Incoming Ballistic Missile!!
All computer disk drives and backups are destroyed!!!
YOU must pay all your taxes, again!!
Note: the cushy salary, cushy pension, cushy medical, cushy, cushy, cushy,
has been carefully saved!
(and YOU can’t fire them, cuz they’ve been hired!!!)
After all of these failures of incompetence, they will all be giving themselves substantial pay raises on schedule.
How does “Marquis ID Systems” get chosen to do this job… when it appears they don’t have any backup for sensitive data, and also they do not have any raid setup on their computer.
Basically, they have taking zero steps towards any kind of data loss prevention… things you learn about in the first week of any basic networking class.
Marquis ID systems should be losing their contract on the spot and never be hired by the state or state agencies again.
That level of incompetence is unexusable for a company that handles sensitive data.
This loss of data would have indeed been 100% prevented, if Marquis ID Systems, would have put literally any minute amount of effort into backing up and securing the data.
Seriously.
State needs to go to University of Hilo and hire some freshmen taking a computer networking class.
I will bet you every single penny to my name, they can do a better job than Marquis ID systems.
Also the person responsible for hiring Marquis ID systems for this type of contract work should also be releived of their duty, they have clearly shown they do not possess good decision making and did not put much effort to verify if the company held any amount of competence whatsoever.