Identity theft never takes a holiday
This Labor Day week has been a busy one for identity thieves. Stolen laptops, personal and financial information posted to websites, and credit card readers contributed to the many data breaches that occurred in the last week of August and the first week of September.
If you eat at McDonalds, are a student, a retired police officer or firefighter, or use MasterCard, you may be among those whose information was compromised this week. If so, you may be a likely candidate for identity theft.
August 26, Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare
Almost 3,000 benefit notices were mailed to the wrong addresses. Besides exposing the client’s names and addresses, about half of the notices included the welfare recipients’ Social Security number.
August 26, Prince William County Public Schools
Students’, employees’ and volunteers’ personal information was posted online. Names, addresses, email addresses, student ID numbers, Social Security numbers, and other private information was exposed on a total of more than 2,600 people.
August 27, Kansas State University
Someone broke into an instructor’s car and stole, among other things, a backpack that contained 86 students’ names and Social Security numbers.
August 28, The Washington Trust Company
One thousand debit and credit card holders have been notified of a security breach affecting an e-commerce company’s web server. The notification didn’t name the company, but identified it as a MasterCard merchant.
August 28, Reynoldsburg Ohio City School District
School district officials were in the midst of making the shift from SSNs as student identifiers, when a laptop was stolen from a computer tech’s car. Besides the SSNs the thieves now have the names, addresses and phone numbers of 4,259 district students.
August 30, Ohio Police and Fire Pension System
The names, addresses and SSNs of 13,000 retired police officers and fire fighters were stolen by a mailroom supervisor. Before quitting his job, the employee forwarded the data file to his personal email account.
August 30, National Technical Institute for the Deaf and Rochester Institute of Technology
The names, dates of birth and SSNs of almost 13,000 student applicants to NTID, and 1,100 RIT study participants were part of the data on a laptop stolen from an NTID office.
And, though it didn’t occur during this same week, it’s worth mentioning that on August 22 a McDonald’s employee in Liberty, Kentucky with an eye toward improving her minimum-wage income, took advantage of her drive-thru position by installing her own personal card reader so she could copy customers’ credit and debit cards and create new cards. It’s not known how many people were affected.
Would you like fries with that?
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