King5 staff report: The Pierce County Housing Authority is conducting an investigation into a security breach that impacts all the people on the county’s wait list for Section 8 housing. The staff does not yet know how it happened, but the names and social security numbers of all the people on the wait list appeared…
Category: Government Sector
VA: Personal data for 13,000 state workers inadvertently released
Annie McCallum reports: Personal data for 13,000 state employees was inadvertently sent to 11 state human resource and payroll employees. The personal information included employee names and Social Security numbers, according to a statement from Anne Waring, Virginia Department of Human Resource Management communications manager. The department was notified by Conexis, Anthem’s subcontractor for Flexible…
GA: Thousands of social security numbers sent in email
And this may be the winning entry for “Email Gaffe of the Week:” An employee error compromised thousands of people’s personal information, including social security numbers, the Georgia Department of Labor said. A spreadsheet containing the names, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers and email addresses of 4,457 people who filed for unemployment in Georgia was…
Former state of Minnesota worker stole IDs of 269 public employees, charges say
Emily Gurnon reports that investigators have found the names and SSN of 269 public employees in the home of a former employee of the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry. Roxanne Kay Deflorin “may have been a source of some of the stolen identities” used by three other women charged in the case, the complaint said….
Update on Department of Energy hack (updated)
More details are available about the Department of Energy hack that occurred in July. Mathew J. Schwartz reports: According to an email sent to all DOE employees on Aug. 29, information on 2,532 current employees, 3,172 former employees and seven employees on leave was stolen in the breach, which occurred in July. At the time, DOE…
Texas Comptroller Ducks Deposition Over Data Breach
Jess Davis reports: A Texas appeals court on Thursday blocked a civil rights advocacy group from deposing the state comptroller about a 2010 data breach that published online personal information about millions of Texans, saying the agency has governmental immunity. Read more on Law360.com (sub. required).