There has been an unfortunate incident in which thousands of people who currently or formerly worked for the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory are now at high risk of having their personal information stolen. According to the Washington Times, the data of 59,000 current and former employees, which includes names, and social security numbers, was saved to a computer disk that was shipped via UPS and lost during shipment to another state. The password protected data applies to employees dating back to the year 1949 who might have had exposure to radioactive or hazardous materials.

The official website of the US Department of Energy has posted information on their homepage that current and former employees would do well to read. Notifications will be sent to those who are affected. There are no indications at this time that the information on the disk has been accesses, however, efforts are being made to recover the disk and to be sure that the data has not been compromised.

The incident has brought about the expressed “disappointment” of Idaho Republican Senator Michael D. Crapo. “I hope your department will continue to follow up on efforts to protect the credit histories of those individuals, and I encourage you to do everything you can to protect against this type of thing in the future,” were Mr. Crapo’s words to the Energy Secretary Steven Chu who is responsible for the oversight of nation’s energy labs.

Linda Foley, of the Identity Theft Resource Center, has commented on this incident and mentioned that these workers might not yet be identity theft victims. It would be a good idea for them to place fraud alerts on their credit for at least six months.

These workers can also add to placing the fraud alerts on their credit by getting a credit protection service that will work to stop criminals from getting credit in their name and pay to help them get their name cleared if someone does get credit in their name.

Whether those affected choose to place fraud alerts themselves, or to choose an identity theft protection service, action should be taken now. It does not take these thieves long to open new accounts. All the time is spent in trying to remove the damage after it has been done.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 10:09 am and is filed under Articles Concerning Identity Theft. 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.