It keeps getting worse

If you’re not in Ohio, maybe you haven’t paid much attention to the happenings of a certain intern and a stolen backup tape, so let me fill you in:

– News reports a backup tape was stolen from an intern, working for the state’s, car. It is believed the tape has personal information, including SSN’s of state employees.

– A few days later, after some initial review, it turns out the tape had state employees, and maybe a few thousand other people, mostly people with unclaimed funds from the state, lottery winnings, income tax refunds, etc. The State will be adding those folks to the list of people being offered a year’s worth of identity-theft services.

– The State has hired a network security firm to “review” the encrypted data on a copy of the stolen tape to determine if any other identifiable information may have been contained.

– Within a couple of weeks, the firm discovers that actually, there’s about 1.1 million records on it.

– We return home from vacation to discover a notice in our mail that I am one of those 1.1 million who’ve been identified from the copy of the data, so far. Lovely. I’ve spent years working to rebuild my credit, after some bad health and other issues a number of years ago, and just as it was looking up, there’s this. (Truthfully I’m not THAT worried about it, the chances of someone having the equipment to decrypt the tape and picking my information out of 1.1 million names to use as a stolen identity is actually pretty slim, but still it is possible.)

– Now we find out that the backup was of a drive that maybe wasn’t even supposed to be where that information was stored?

And people wonder why I’m skeptical when it comes to the government doing anything right…

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