Andrew Shain reports:
A bill, approved Tuesday by a state Senate committee, would offer credit-fraud protection for 10 years to S.C. taxpayers and others after hackers stole information belonging to 6.4 million consumers, children and businesses from the S.C. Department of Revenue last fall.
The bill now goes to the full Senate.
[…]
The bill approved unanimously Tuesday by the Senate Finance Committee also creates:
- department of information security that reports to the governor;
- A tax credit of $300 for individual filers and $1,000 for joint filers to buy credit protection;
- An identity-theft unit at the S.C. Department of Consumer Affairs; and
- A pair of committees to recommend statewide technology and cyber-security policies.
State Sen. Harvey Peeler, R-Gaffney, said he was concerned about the new staffing and layers of government created by the bill, developed after 11 meetings of a special committee. “I have not seen this much creation since Genesis.”
Read more on Herald Online.
This is one of those “If only they’d invested in IT security before…” situations as they estimate that this breach may cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of clean-up and prevention of future recurrences. Of course, I don’t think they should count prevention costs as they should have been doing that already, but this is still turning out to be a costly breach for the state and taxpayers.