Classified data stolen from Pak PM’s office
A substantial amount of official data of the Pakistan Prime Minister’s Secretariat, including some classified documents, has been stolen by persons employed on short-term contracts who accessed a secure computer system.
The kind of classified information that was stolen was not immediately clear though the Dawn newspaper quoted a source as saying that the head of a multi-million rupee project to computerise and safeguard government data had “run away with classified data”.
A complaint about the stolen data has been lodged with the executive director of the electronic government directorate by the manager of the information system at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, the source said. In the complaint, information system manager Farhan Karim Jaskani said: “Mr TR transferred the classified data from PM’s secretariat database without prior permission of the joint secretary (admin)…which was later proved in the office of the joint secretary where the said official (TR) admitted this.” A senior security official described the incident as a serious breach of security.
“The data was stolen from the database server of the PM’s secretariat, clearly exposing the weak information security protocols in place,” he told the newspaper.
The official said that a strict security protocol for protecting information and the system from unauthorised access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification or destruction was not followed in this case.
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