In researching the types of identity theft and occurrences of identity theft, we find more and more that a lot of the larger companies are either targeted or become victims of the professional ID Theft criminal. They either lose track of a laptop, or have a desktop computer hacked. Every once in a while, it is due to an employee who no longer keeps information confidential. Since we all have to give out personal information in order to conduct business with certain companies, wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a way of detecting whether or not that information is being compromised sooner than later?

Are you familiar with VeriSign ? They are a company that offers digital certificates of “security” for e-commerce and communication websites. That being said, one would think that they would never end up in our blog, however….

…they were breached (last year) too! Actually, the personal data of present and prior employees was stolen. Guess where it was being stored? You got it…another laptop! This one was not the fault of the company, but rather of an employee (who has since left the company) who broke policy and removed the laptop from the company building. The number affected was not released in the incident report, however, they were sent letters to make them aware.

Police noted that the theft did seem to be a part of number of robberies that took place in the area, so the crime does not look like one that was motivated by identity theft.

If you have not gotten a copy of your credit report lately, you will need to do so and look for any unfamiliar accounts that need to be cleared up. You will also want to get inexpensive id theft protection.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 11:19 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.