Nicole Blake Johnson reports:
A Veterans Affairs Department data breach may have put at risk the personal information of more than 4,000 veterans, VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker said Wednesday.
That is nearly twice the number of potentially affected vets VA said last week were eligible for credit monitoring because of the breach.
The information, including Social Security numbers, was posted on Ancestry.com last March and not discovered by VA until December, eight months later, when the daughter of a living veteran complained that personal information about her parent had been posted on the website, Baker said. The information was immediately taken off the website last month.
As of Wednesday, VA had confirmed that the personal information of at least 2,257 living veterans was mistakenly released to Ancestry.com as part of a response to a Freedom of Information Act request involving 14.7 million veteran records, Baker said. VA is reviewing about 2,000 additional names to determine if the individuals are deceased or living.
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