A Japanese bloke from the city of Amagasaki has had a shocker - having a few too many beers and losing a USB stick containing the personal information of every person in the city.
We’ve all had some bad cases of hangxiety. The mornings where you’re scared to check your phone, or your flatmates asking, “how are YOU feeling this morning?” -y'know, the mornings from hell.
However, one employee of Biprogy Inc must have had an all-time hangxiety attack after losing a valuable USB stick.
The stick contained basic info (zip code, date of birth, etc) for all of the 460,517 residents of Amagasaki, as well as containing tax and bank info of more than 70,000 of the residents.
Biprogy shared a timeline of the night which helps explain how the USB went missing, but doesn't paint the employee in the greatest of lights.
On June 21st the employee put the data on the USB. So far so good.
He was then meant to transfer the stick to another information centre and then delete then wipe all the data off of it. Instead, old mate just said ‘fuck it’ and chucked the stick in his bag.
We’re off to a flyer here.
Later on in the night, at 7:30, our friend and three of his coworkers hit the town to grab a bite and some booze. Three hours later, the group split. Old mate still had the bag and USB in his possession at this time.
The next piece of information the company gives us takes place at 3am. Like most ‘one too many’ nights our USB holder is unaccounted for almost 5 hours. Anyway, at 3am the man was sleeping on the street and the bag was not with him.
The bloke, understandably, took a sick day the next day and didn’t report the bag missing until 2pm. By that time we guess he had smashed back a Powerade or two and a greasy Uber Eats order.
Eventually, the bag and USB were found, thanks to the dusty delinquent leaving his phone in the bag.
30, yes, 30 police officers rocked up to the location of the bag, in an apartment in Suita, Osaka and grabbed it.
City officials said that the data was encrypted and didn’t seem to be accessed by anyone, but the company said they’ll be monitoring the internet for any leaks.
“We will work to regain our residents’ trust by heightening awareness of the importance of protecting personal information,” they said in a statement.
So the privacy of hundreds of thousands of innocent people was maintained, but we don’t know what happened to the poor bloke.
We can assume he took some verbal abuse from his bosses and that he swore to himself he's never drinking again... just one beer though.
