VIRGINIA COMPUTER CONTAINING PERSONAL INFORMATION OF ELDERLY CITIZENS STOLEN FROM GOVERNMENT AGENCY ARTICLE: Personal data stolen from Virginia agency (The Virginian-Pilot - HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com):
Personal data stolen from Virginia agency
By CHRISTINA NUCKOLS, The Virginian-Pilot
© May 1, 2007
RICHMOND - The names, addresses and Social Security numbers of 40,000 people were stolen last month from a state agency that serves elderly Virginians.
Officials at the Virginia Department for the Aging said they have notified all those affected by the privacy breach and advised them to monitor their bills and financial accounts for fraudulent claims.
The department helps elderly people obtain meals and home care. The database contained the names of people receiving services and the names of their caregivers, said Debbie Burcham, chief deputy for the department.
Burcham said a computer and other equipment were stolen April 18 from the Richmond headquarters of the agency. She said a police investigation is pending and declined to give more details about the theft.
Notices were mailed to people in the database on April 26, eight days after the theft.
About 150 people have contacted the department on a special hotline set up to handle questions about identity theft, Burcham said; the number is 1-866-331-8290. She said no one has reported any fraudulent claims.
Burcham said the disappearance of other equipment in addition to the computer might mean the thief or thieves were not interested in the database, only the hardware.
Department officials said the client data is double-password-protected, but privacy advocates said that is not sufficient to safeguard personal information.
Beth Givens, founder and director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in California, said such data also should be encrypted to prevent a thief from reading the information.
"If the data were encrypted, they could be fairly well assured that the data would not be usable," she said.
Givens said elderly people are particularly vulnerable to identity theft. She said it is important that they be reassured that they are not obligated to pay any fraudulent bills resulting from a privacy breach.
State officials have advised people included in the database to obtain a credit report and place a fraud alert on their credit files. Consumers may obtain a free credit report once every 12 months, and the fraud alert also is free of charge.
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