Recent reports reflect that over 89,000 people who are associated with the Texas lottery (either as employees or as winners), have had their personal information taken from a state agency by a former employee. A computer analyst that once worked for the state commission for eight years, copied the data onto disks, without permission. The data copied includes social security numbers, names, addresses and amounts awarded.

Authorities state that they have no evidence that this information was taken with the intent to commit fraud. Those affected will be contacted and advised to place a fraud alert on their credit files.
Dawn Nettles, the lottery commission’s unofficial watchdog, blamed the agency for lax security procedures. “The guy clearly did wrong. He should not have had any personal data on his work computer. However, he should not have been able to copy the files. There should have been a password required,” she said.
A spokesperson for the agency has stated that officials do hope to prevent similar incidents from taking place, however, no new security measures have been put in place yet. The former employee stated that he “indiscriminantly copied all the files from the My DOC folder to a CD/DVD which I carried (to subsequent jobs),” He also has been quoted as saying that he wanted such information “for possible future reference as a programmer at other state agencies.”
Cases like this make millions of satisfied members glad that they have LifeLock identity theft protection services to watch out for any identity theft signals that could result in financial and personal damage. See their website at: www.LifeLock.com or view more posts on this blog relating to LifeLock to see their full range of services.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 4:07 pm 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.