My employer just announced that our personal info has been stolen.?

Question

We received a memo today from my employer that someone had sent personal info including ss #'s via email from work to an unrecognized email address. Coincidentally, our benefits person mysteriously was fired a little over a week ago. What rights do I have and what can I do to protect myself. I already have alerts set up for my credit report.

Answer 1

Call all credit card companies and have new numbers issued for your accounts. Close existing bank accounts and open new ones with different numbers.

Answer 2

The crime of Identity Theft is still new and few laws addressing it exist.

So you have no rights or remedies for the problem. If you are a victim of Identity Theft, and if you can prove that the information came from that breach in security then you can file a lawsuit against the company. But, you have to be hurt first and then you have to prove that the company's error was the fault that hurt you. If you could get the person who stole you identity to tell you where they got the data from then you might be able to file a case, but otherwise you have no protection.

The Benefits Person may have been fired for causing the breach, for another reason or as a scapegoat for the breech.

Remember the big case where a notebook was stolen from a VA official. The notebook had the SSN for thousands, maybe millions of service numbers on it. Such data should never have been stored on a notebook computer in the first place, never mind being taken out of the office, but it happened. There was a big concern that a identity theft ring could get the information and that a whole lot of service members could become victims. Luckily the notebook computer was recovered and the VA said that the theft had nothing to do with identity theft and that the thief hadn't accessed the data on the computer.

We still don’t know the name of the thief or the reasoning behind the theft and the decision that it wasn’t a threat, but so far I haven’t heard of any case where a service member was a victim of identity theft due to that security breach. Proving it was that breech, without the cooperation of the thief, will be next to impossible.

The problem is that the SSN was designed only for the government to use and not to act as a universal identification number. When I was serving with the US Military overseas they wanted us to put our SSN on all of our mail to make it easier to find us.

What should be done is the creation of a registry with a more secure ID number, one that is based on alpha numerics like many passwords. The more variables in the number the harder it will be to decode and the larger the possible database. This number could then be used by the credit card companies and other companies to track secure operations.

Answer 3

You did the right thing by setting up those alerts. Just keep track of everything and check often.


You can also have a hold on your info so nobody can open any accounts or anything for 3 months...helps a lot

Answer 4

Just put a fraud alert on your credit report. No need to do anything else. This type of thing is quite frequent these days, and 90% of the time it's harmless, but they have to legally notify you anyway just in case.

Answer 5

now that you've set up the alerts (and good for you!), print your credit report every month and stay on top of it....print all three agencies....

i don't know about any rights that you may have that you might want to sue over....because as soon as your employer found out, she notified everyone and also fired the offender.
all you can do now is be vigilant!

good luck :)

Answer 6

Contact your company's legal and HR departments and ask them the very same questions. They have a duty to protect your personal information.