Do you have benefits at work ? We all know how important it is to provide personal information to benefit providers so that they can administer our plan. Something we might not all have considered is: how well is our benefit plan administrator protected from being hacked or a victim of theft?

Earlier this year, several thousand people from CNET Networks were informed that their personal data had been compromised by a computer theft from an office of their benefit provider company. This affected not only employees, but also relatives who were beneficiaries of the plans.

Colt Express Outsourcing Services, the company that was storing the data of CNET (and other companies) employees, is not offering free credit monitoring services. Rather, they have sent letters to those affected that included information “we believe you need.” Who knows what that information is, but it does not sound like the best protection for those who were affected, from being victims.

If you were in any way affected by this data breach and have not enrolled in an identity theft protection service, you can sign up for Lifelock today.  Use code Defense to receive a discount.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under Data Breach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.