Texas, you better sit down for this. Texas State Comptroller Susan Combs announced on Monday that the names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other information of 3.5 million residents in the state was sitting on public server, exposed, for over a year. Whoops. From Ars Technica: “So far, the state says there’s no indication that the data was misused, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t or won’t be sometime in the future. In addition to the aforementioned personal information, Combs said that other data, like date of birth and driver’s license numbers had been exposed “to varying degrees.” Additionally, “all the numbers were embedded in a chain of numbers and not in separate fields”–good if only lazy “hackers” accessed the file, but bad because it ensures that the appropriate data is matched with other data from the same person.” Combs recommends people put a fraud alert out to all their credit card companies and keep a close watch out for any sign of identity theft. Thanks a lot, Texas.
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