The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has apologised to its thousands of serving officers and civilian staff whose personal and employment data was compromised in a “significant” data breach.
The incident happened when the PSNI responded to a Freedom of Information request seeking the number of officers and staff at all ranks and grades across the organisation, Assistant Chief Constable Chris Todd confirmed.
A table was embedded in the request response that contained the rank and grade data, but also included detailed information that attached the surname, initial, the location and the departments for all employees of the PSNI.
The incident happened when the PSNI responded to a Freedom of Information request seeking the number of officers and staff at all ranks and grades across the organisation, Assistant Chief Constable Chris Todd confirmed.
A table was embedded in the request response that contained the rank and grade data, but also included detailed information that attached the surname, initial, the location and the departments for all employees of the PSNI.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 This evening I've had to inform the Information Commissioner's Office of a significant data breach that we're responsible for.
00:07 What's happened is we've received a Freedom of Information request.
00:11 That's quite a routine inquiry, nothing untoward in that.
00:16 We've responded to that request which was seeking to understand the token numbers of officers and staff at all ranks and grade across the organisation.
00:25 And in the response, unfortunately, one of our colleagues has embedded the source data which informed that request.
00:33 So what was within that data was the surname, the initial, the rank or grade, the location in the department for each of our current employees across the police service.
00:46 I understand that that will be of considerable concern to many of my colleagues and their families indeed at the moment.
00:53 We operate in an environment at the moment where there's a severe threat to our colleagues from Northern Ireland related terrorism
00:59 and this is the last thing that anybody in the organisation wants to be hearing this evening.
01:04 So I owe it to all of my colleagues to make sure that this is investigated thoroughly and we've initiated that.
01:10 We'll keep the Police Board informed, we'll keep all the staff associations informed of that investigation
01:15 and we've been engaging with them throughout the afternoon.
01:18 The information was taken down very quickly but nevertheless I do appreciate the concern that it will cause.
01:23 We'll seek to find the extent to which that has been viewed but what I would say is although the error was our own,
01:30 once that information was out there, if anybody did have access to it, I would ask them to delete it straight away.