3.6 million Social Security numbers hacked in S.C.

veritas_libertas

Lovely. It seems my state did a bad job of protecting themselves from hackers. While it would be easy for me to criticize them at least they were wise enough to hire Mandiant to clean up the mess. They also took responsibility and provided free credit monitoring. If live in South Carolina and have paid taxes between 1998 and now you should immediately get credit monitoring. You should also have your Credit/Debit cards replaced.

The U.S. Secret Service detected a security breach at the S.C. Department of Revenue on Oct. 10, but it took state officials 10 days to close the attacker’s access and another six days to inform the public that 3.6 million Social Security numbers had been compromised.


The attack also exposed 387,000 credit and debit card numbers. The stolen data included other information people file with their tax returns such as names and addresses. Businesses’ taxpayer identification numbers also potentially have been comprised in the attack that is being described as one of the nation’s largest against a state agency.

Read more here: 3.6 million Social Security numbers hacked in S.C. - Crime & Courts - TheState.com

Hypntick

"Most of the data had not been encrypted, meaning the hacker would not need a key to a secret code to read the stolen data.
Revenue director James Etter said none of the Social Security numbers were encrypted and about 16,000 credit card numbers were not encrypted."

Why doesn't this shock me. Thanks for posting this, had to call my Dad real quick and inform him so he can protect himself. What a load of crap.

neo9006

Agreed, but doesn't surprise me either, government needs to do a better job at allot of things including protecting your information like this, they need to hire some of us lol.

Darthn3ss

Heard about this, I'm interested to know if they're going to actually going to secure this data in the future. Encrypting sensitive data is pretty basic stuff.