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13000 SSN posted on internet in LA
From: Henry Brown <hbrown () knology net>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:23:59 -0500
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/capital/index.ssf?/base//news-6/1219902067300440.xml&coll=1 BATON ROUGE -- A glitch during a computer upgrade at the Louisiana Real Estate Commission caused the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of more than 13,000 licensed agents to be exposed on the Internet last week, sending waves of concern through the real estate community statewide. The commission, which is a state regulatory agency that oversees the licensing of all real estate agents and brokers, discovered the problem Friday after the confidential information had been accessible on the Internet for about two days, Executive Director J.C. Willie said. "Are we concerned? I guess we got to be," said Mark Rodi, president of Louisiana Realtors, a private industry group. "But you can't get upset about what you can't control." [...] The insurer in years past had required that all the agents be identified by their Social Security numbers. That form of agent ID is no longer used by the commission or the insurance carrier. But the commission had kept the old list with the Social Security numbers in its computer files, Willie said. "It was an unfortunate occurrence, but it was handled immediately upon discovery," said Commission Chairwoman Gretchen Ezernack, a Monroe Realtor. The commission contacted the Internet search engine companies Google and Yahoo to ensure that the pages were not being retained by their systems, Willie said. Willie said it would be hard to pinpoint exactly who left the file exposed and that he expected there would be no consequences for whoever might be to blame. Rodi and Louisiana Realtors Chief Executive Malcolm Young said they were satisfied that the commission was doing all it could to address the problem. _______________________________________________ Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () attrition org) http://attrition.org/dataloss Tenable Network Security offers data leakage and compliance monitoring solutions for large and small networks. Scan your network and monitor your traffic to find the data needing protection before it leaks out! http://www.tenablesecurity.com/products/compliance.shtml
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- 13000 SSN posted on internet in LA Henry Brown (Aug 29)