One reason why you should be sure that you have protected your identity, is explained in the following story. This shows how easy it is for someone to access information about you online, without your knowledge.

A high school in North Carolina has had social security numbers and other personal information about their staff, available to the public via internet for the past five years. The breach was discovered by Liberty Coalition, based in Washington D.C. This organization searches the internet for such lack of security and were easily able to access the private information of these individuals.

Once the school was notified, they were able to take the information down in a matter of minutes. They also worked toward removing this data from search engine caches (basically, data that has been changed on the actual website that still shows in the search engines until automatically updated). No reason was given as to how the data ended up posting online.

Those affected received the infamous “letter” informing them of the matter. Imagine how it must feel to find out that your personal information was on the internet where others were finding it and you did not even know!

No evidence of use of this data has been found, however, the letter they received did address how to protect themselves against identity theft.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under LifeLock. 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.