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I have been looking for the 1TB (terabyte) hard drive that was in my cabinet for a good month now without success. It has disappeared from my filing cabinet

“The only person that knew where it was…” The remainder of the sentence has been redacted.

The email goes on to say that the employee checked with a coworker who “I knew … had another one” that could be used to back up data being migrated across the department’s internal network.

“This morning I needed it and this one too has disappeared,” the email reads. “I would like to be table to keep working on the migration and I do require a 1TB portable external hard drive.”

Morrissette said only “one hard drive has been unaccounted for.” He said the second drive noticed missing was ultimately returned, but didn’t say how long it was gone, or why it went missing.

One hard drive has been unaccounted for

The department has said that it has no evidence that the information on the drive has been used for criminal or fraudulent means. The internal investigation at HRSDC concluded early on that the device appeared to be misplaced, rather than stolen.

Security officers at HRSDC, once notified of the breach, interviewed the employee responsible for the external hard drive — the person’s name has been redacted from the documents — and found the person “appears to be honest, (forthcoming) with information, willing to help and transparent,” reads a Dec. 4 email from David Zorzo, the capital region security manager for HRSDC. The email says the employee’s director, Andrea Knight, then acting director of program integrity and accountability for the student loan program, also called the employee “trustworthy and honest” and “immediately informed senior management of the missing hard drive” when they realized it was missing.

The department has said that it has no evidence that the information on the drive has been used for criminal or fraudulent means

Another Dec. 4 email, this one from Knight to assistant deputy minister Allen Sutherland, says that the department was still compiling a list of affected individuals while security officials checked the computers of three employees “to confirm who last used the hard drive,” checked “the hard drive that was turned in by a former employee to see if in fact the data might have been on this hard drive and erased,” and interviewed “two former employees who are now with other departments.”