File it under the heading of “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.”

The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration is sending out letters to 55,000 organ donors to notify them of a data breach that occurred June 20. Apparently, a glitch in the system allowed unauthorized users to access the data base containing information on the six million good souls from the Sunshine State who agreed not to take their organs with them.

For the period from January 2005 to July 19, 2008 at least 234,111,062 records have been compromised in data breaches, according to Attrition-Dataloss, a non-profit organization that reports and tracks data breaches.

Get a Florida drivers’ license and you’ll be asked whether you’d like to donate your organs for transplant upon your demise. So, when the data breach occurred, donors’ names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and of their drivers’ license numbers were all up for grabs.

So far, there haven’t been any reports of identity theft resulting from the donor registry breach, but all the information is there if someone decides to take out some new credit cards. Agency Secretary Holly Benson said the flaw was corrected within a day of the discovery.

“We felt that transparency in this matter was necessary to protect the Floridians whose information may have been at risk,” said Benson.

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