Security breach may affect 77, 000 public employees, retirees in Alaska, raising threat of identity theft

[kirniki <kirniki () gmail com>]

http://newsminer.com/pages/full_story/push?blog-entry-Security+breach+may+affect+77-000+Alaskans%20&id=5689968&instance=blogs_editors_desk

One of the immediate questions about the security leak the state
announced today is why did the accounting firm learn about it in early
December and reveal it to the state last week?

PricewaterhouseCoopers should have acted sooner when it learned that
the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of 77,000 people
were lost in its Chicago office and the information could have fallen
into the wrong hands.

The people at risk for identify theft are those who were in the PERS
and TRS system in 2003-04 as active or inactive employees or retirees.
A reader notes the irony about the state announcement, which occurred
on “Data Privacy Day,” an international observance about the need to
safeguard private information.

The attorney general said the state was first informed last week it
had a “problem,” but it took a few days to determine the potential
extent of the problem. Attorney General Dan Sullivan said the first
conversation he  had with upper management of PricewaterhouseCoopers
“wasn’t very pleasant.”

[..]
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