32,000 Victims of New ID Theft Hack

By Ed Oswald | Published March 9, 2005, 12:52 PM

First Choicepoint revealed that the personal data of 145,000 individuals had been compromised in late February. Now, LexisNexis has disclosed that the personal information of up to 32,000 customers may have been compromised.

The break-in occurred at LexisNexis-owned Seisint, a company that specializes in creating databases from information it gets from the U.S. government. Obtained in the hack were names, addresses, and social security and driver's license numbers.

LexisNexis, a subsidiary of publisher Reed Elsevier, stumbled upon the problem after receiving a billing complaint from a customer last week.

LexisNexis, like ChoicePoint, said it will offer to assist those affected by helping them in any way possible to prevent identity theft, as well as pay for any credit monitoring tools they may use.

In a bizarre twist, Seisint and ChoicePoint had actually been in several legal battles over the past several years. ChoicePoint had sued Seisint at one time, and Seisint founder Hank Asher once sued Choicepoint for $1.8 billion accusing its executives of trying to sour the buyout by Reed Elsevier.

Like in the ChoicePoint situation, law enforcement has asked Seisint to keep all public disclosures of the situation to a minimum so they can try to "catch up with these people," according to representatives of the company.

Comments

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LexisNexis is very serious with their work. That company is run like something out of a goverment conspirarcy and then coverd up by black-ops.

Short Story: Friend of mine works for the phone company and went there to do work on some of the T1 lines they use. They scanned his fingerprint and his eye and had pictures of him he never gave permission to take and all th guard did was smile.

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First, Lets not forget that it could be an inside job. Second, why did they disclose? Unless I'm wrong only businesses in California are regulated to do so.

Are companies seeing the liability issue as the motivation for fixing and plugging the holes. Is that a form of progress.

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It is a total lack of understanding on how to secure a LAN/MAN/WAN let alone an Enterprise network such as the net.

All it takes is one client on the network to be cracked, and then "all your base be ours"...

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It would be nice to know the operating systems these companies are using as they get hacked.

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Well i'm sure its not windows... :)

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Too bad they don't "specialize" in security! Damn lamers.

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OS? It seems completely irrelavent to the topic. A better question might be I wonder what kind of database they are running or what kind of firewall they have.

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Nothing is ever 100% safe...

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Actually I saw a news broadcast about ChoicePoint and they WERE using Windows...

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