Science

#UK says ‘human error’ wiped 1000s of police computer records

#UK says ‘human error’ wiped 1000s of police computer records

computer virus
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Britain’s policing minister said Monday that “human error” led to hundreds of thousands of DNA records and other data on criminal suspects being erased from the national police computer.

Kit Malthouse told lawmakers in the House of Commons that the mishap occurred during a “regular housekeeping process” on the computer, which holds 13 million records. He said some 400,000 records were wiped, including 213,000 offense records and 170,000 arrest records.

“Clearly this situation is very serious,” Malthouse said, adding that “we will know the full extent of the impact of this issue over the next few days.”

Labour lawmaker Yvette Cooper said it was “very hard to understand how 400,000 records could be deleted from such a crucial system without there being a proper back-up system in place.”

Malthouse said officials were trying to recover the data but he could not guarantee that no criminal investigations would be harmed by the error. He said the government was working “to make sure that any operational impact is obviated or mitigated.”


Pennsylvania reveals cyber intrusion in birth, death records


© 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Citation:
UK says ‘human error’ wiped 1000s of police computer records (2021, January 18)
retrieved 18 January 2021
from https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-uk-human-error-1000s-police.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on Google News too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.

For forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com

If you want to read more Like this articles, you can visit our Science category.

Source

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button
Close

Please allow ads on our site

Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker!