January 23, 2012

I liked it better when this data stayed in Dryden

at the former NYSEG headquarters, rather than spreading because of:

an employee at an independent software development consulting firm who allowed unauthorized access to one of the companies' customer information systems. The customer records contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth and, in some cases, financial institution account numbers.

Of course, the data may have been just as unprotected before NYSEG was bought out - at least I don't think we heard of any breaches. A year of credit monitoring service from a company that I'm sure will hope to sell us continuing credit monitoring services doesn't really make things better.

Want to know more? Here's the letter you'll likely be getting, the press release, and the frequently asked questions (FAQ). It sounds to me like it was their main billing data, though I'd love to be wrong and find out that it was a smaller subset.

Let's hope they do a better job with natural gas than they do with personal information.

Posted by simon at January 23, 2012 6:15 PM in ,
Note on photos