Non-standard incident has occurred in Portland. Criminals, who probably were druggies, broke in the door at Fiducial Business Services and stole computers with backup private information for about 20,000 clients of a Portland tax business. The thieves, who left syringes and drug paraphernalia at the scene, took the equipment but no paper files. Information on the computers, which is encrypted and requires a password for access, includes client names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other data required for tax preparation. All those data is compromised.
The crime was registered in the morning of June 21, but clients began to receive notifications only 24 days after it. It's rather long delay, because citizens could become victims of data theft, if criminals had wanted to swindle. Moreover, the information stored on those computers was enough for everyone to turn into Fiducial Business Services' customer. Executives say that the company has outsourced the warning letters, so they don't know why it has taken so long for them to reach the 20,000 clients.
It's not the first time when weak physical security measures lead to confidential data leakage. The biggest incident occurred in the end of March 2005. Joseph Nathaniel Harris broke in the door of San Jose Medical Group and stole two Dell computers and CD that contained medical and financial information about 185,000 patients of the group. After being caught Joseph said that he didn't want to steal private data, he needed only hardware.
To sum up there are great chances that Portland druggies focused on hardware too. In this case they will try to sell computers, but not private data.
“Weak office security often causes troubles. Now it's confidential data leakage. Nevertheless we can compliment Fiducial Business Services for encrypting private data and protecting computers with passwords. If all those measures were performed correctly, criminals would never get to sensitive records”, - said Denis Zenkin, the Marketing Director of InfoWatch company.
Source: OregonLive.com
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