LifeLock

A good bit of my identity theft and data breach info comes from A Chronology of Data Breaches, which is compiled by the good folks at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. I periodically cruise through their site, checking to see what groups of numbskulls has lost how many records recently.

This week there have been eight newly reported data breaches. Unlike last week when news broke about the CheckFree Corp. hacking that exposed the personal and financial information of somewhere between 160,000 and 5,000,000 consumers, there haven’t been any big breaches that we know of. As is so often the case, some of this week’s data breaches affected an unknown number of people.

• University of Rochester, NY: Hackers stole personal information including the Social Security numbers of about 450 current and former UR students.
• Columbus City Schools, OH: Police officers who went to home to serve arrest warrants for drug and car theft charges found the stolen personal information including Social Security numbers of 100 of the school district’s employees. (Add a warrant for identity theft to the list.)
• University of Oregon: A laptop containing the personal information including Social Security numbers of an unknown number of Youth Transition Program participants was stolen.
• Innodata Isogen: A laptop containing current and former employees’ personal information including Social Security numbers was stolen. The number of affected records is unknown.
• Seventh Day Adventist Church, Silver Springs, MD: A laptop containing the personal information including the Social Security numbers of 292 people was stolen and recovered.
• Continental Airlines: A laptop that containing the personal information including fingerprints and Social Security numbers of 230 employees was stolen.
• Blue Ridge Community Action, Morganton, NC: An external hard drive containing the personal information including Social Security numbers of 300 clients is missing and may have been stolen.
• Occidental Petroleum Corporation: A former employee emailed the personal information including Social Security numbers of other employees to his home computer. The number of affected employees is unknown.

These incidents bring the total number of records known to have been involved in data breaches since January 2005 to 251,155,441.

Visit LifeLock.com and enroll using the LifeLock promo code Defense to get a discount on their identity theft protection services chosen by nearly 1.5 million Americans.