Now you would think that those who receive welfare would be safe from data breaches, since their data is kept by government offices. Not the case in Pennsylvania, though. This incident was not even the target of identity thieves, it was just a huge error on the part of a machine!

One of the machines that was being used by the state Department of Public Welfare to automatically insert mail, had a paper jam. This caused over 2,000 packets that contained information on renewing benefits to be mailed to the wrong recipients. These included not only names, but a good number of them also included social security numbers.

Those affected were informed of the error, by letter! (We are assuming that this time the machine did not jam and the letters were correctly addressed). The victims were also to be given fraud alert services for 90 days. Do you think that these individuals would still be at risk after 3 months?

How will this be rectified? Well there will now be communication with the manufacturer of the “accused” machine. Now that everything has been screwed up, they will now provide “additional” training on how to use the machine (that might have come in handy before this point). Also, packets will be “spot” checked to be sure they are going to the right recipient.

This same department had computers stolen last year which had personal information of many of the state’s residents on it’s hard drive.

For anyone who might be affected by this data breach, LifeLock is available to help you protect your credit.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 7:07 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.