A lawsuit has been filed against the office of Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp alleging the office disclosed nearly 6 million voters’ personal information.
According to Kemp, the office shares voter registration information every month with various news outlets and political parties as required by Georgia law. Due to a ‘clerical error’ where the information was put into the wrong file, 12 recipients received a disk containing the personal information of millions of Georgian voters.
Dates of birth, social security numbers, and driver license numbers are among the information leaked during this incident.
Kemp has stated that his office took immediate action to help get the discs back from the recipients they were mistakenly sent to, but the lawsuit claims that no consumer reporting agencies or a single Georgia citizen were notified of the massive breach that occurred on October 13. In fact, the officials may not have even realized they had suffered from a Data Breach until two voters filed the class-action lawsuit against them.
Social security numbers and driver license numbers are very valuable to identity thieves and with this mistake potentially affecting over 6 million Georgia residents, it’s vitally important that the Office of Georgia’s Secretary take every step necessary to fix this colossal error and start understanding the importance of protecting their IT environment from not only external threats but from internal threats and errors.
Read the article on Security InfoWatch