Wisconsin State Contractor EDS Breaches 260,000
Who Breached: EDS (contractor for Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services)
Number Affected: 260,000
Information breached: Social Security Numbers
How: Printed on brochures
Wisconsin State Department of Health and Family Services contractor EDS has sent out 260,000 informational brochures with Social Security Numbers printed on them. This is the second mailing label-related breach at the state level in the last 13 months, the previous being in December, 2006 on tax mailing forms.
Texas-based EDS is a private vendor hired by the state for Medicaid services. The recipients of the informational brochures, whose Social Security Numbers were breached on their mailing labels, include SeniorCare, Medicaid and BadgerCare members.
Karen Timberlake, deputy secretary of the state department, puts all blame onto EDS for the incident:
“We are appalled that EDS made this mistake. We take our responsibility for protecting the confidentiality of our members very seriously — and we expect our contractors to do the same.”
Bill Ritz, an EDS spokesman, says the breach was isolated and the result of human error when the address file was created. The error was caught after 260,000 of the 485,000 brochures had gone out. They are providing credit monitoring to those affected and are “implementing additional steps to protect against a repeat of this type of error.”
State Sen. Ted Kanavas, responding to three data breaches in Wisconsin in the last 3 years, including the two mailing label incidents, renewed his call for the government to audit how it uses personal information.
“You yell for it now. You don’t call for anything. You scream for it. Hey, dummies get it right.”
The Senator does well to lay some blame on the State, for it is State security policies which must be enforced with the contractors. As this is a repeat incident, one could say that more blame lies with the State for not correcting its data security problems. It is hard to conceive of a reason why the marketing department at EDS was authorized to see this information at all.
Via attrition, business week, computerworld Tags: wisconsin state, eds, department of health and family services, data breach, it security, breach
2 Comments on “Wisconsin State Contractor EDS Breaches 260,000”
August 13th, 2008 at 12:06 am
I agree with his opinion,state has to provide EDS with Social Security numbers and other sensitive information because the company processes Medicaid claims for the state. That differs from the mistake last year, when the Revenue Department gave Social Security numbers to a printing company that had no need for that data.
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maria
http://www.treatmentcenters.org/wisconsin
August 13th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Yea This is right choice.Besides, in developing countries, the state’s capacity to reach the vast majority of the poor people may be limited because of its limited resources.So Right information is mostly needed……..