The days of backup drives with unencrypted information being stolen from unattended vehicles is not totally a thing of the past.
On April 26, New Hampshire Distributors, LLC notified the state attorney general’s office that a stolen backup drive contained information on 924 New Hampshire residents. The total number of individuals affected was not disclosed.
It’s an old, sad story: On April 6, an employee of their IT vendor left the premises with a backup driving containing information that included names, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and financial account information. The next day, the employee learned that the vehicle had been broken into and the backup drive stolen. The vendor filed a police report immediately.
Although NHD notified the attorney general of the data types mentioned above, their letter to their employees mentioned names, addresses, home and/or cell phone number, and Social Security numbers, as well as files from the employees’ NHD laptops and desktops. No mention was made to the employees of any financial account information or driver’s license numbers, and it is not clear from their notification to the state whether all of the data on the stolen drive was from employees-only or employees and customers. There is no attached letter that would be sent to consumers, but the firm’s LinkedIn profile indicates it (only) has 51-200 employees, so there are either a lot of former employees’ data on the backup drive or it did include customer data. An inquiry sent to NHD received no response by publication time.
Curiously, the attached letter to employees also mentions that employees may want to check with credit bureaus to ensure that there is no credit report on their children, even though there is no mention of any dependents’ information being on the stolen drive.
New Hampshire Distributors appears to have decided that this was a “low-risk” incident because the the drive was password-protected and required proprietary software to read.
In any event, they offered two years of monitoring services via IDT911.
As a result of this incident, the backup drive is now encrypted with 256-bit encryption.
So who was the vendor? Well, from reading the notification letter to employees, they say that it was Daystar.
DataBreaches.net will update this post if NHD responds to questions emailed earlier today.