It has been reported that the US Department of State disclosed last week that close to 400 people who applied for passports, were affected by a data breach within their department. This breach occurred back in March and all affected have been offered one year of free credit monitoring. Letters of notification were mailed out back on July 10th and also on October 6th. About the same time of year, the department had revealed that contractors illegally gained access to the passport records of Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, as well as others who have a high profile. A spokeswoman for the State Department, stated that a department employee was terminated for illegally accessing 383 records.

At that time, an evaluation of the security being used to protect the information that the State Department keeps on file for passports was started. The system that they use to store this type of information contains the data of 127 million people. In July, the findings were released and showed some weaknesses in the systems security controls. Policies and procedures for protecting this data were lacking in general, however, the department has since increased security.

The State Department found out about this data breach via Washington police officers who found several credit cards and also printouts of several passport applications when they searched a car stopped for a violation. Police were able to discern that these items had been stolen for the purpose of committing identity theft.

The driver of the car, informed the police that he had accomplices at the State Department and the US Postal Service. The driver was shot and killed about one month later, before he went to trial.

At this point, the State Department spokeswoman has stated that they do not believe the stolen data has been misused, however, the investigation is ongoing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 9:38 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.