Nice: government incompetence discovered by 'bored browser'.
U.S. Database Exposes Social Security Numbers
The Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of people who received loans or other financial assistance from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations.Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet.
“I was bored, and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there,” said Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Ill.
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The Census database disclosure is the latest in a string of embarrassing data-security breaches at federal agencies in the last few years. Last year, hackers illegally accessed an Agriculture Departmentdatabase containing the names, Social Security numbers and photos of current and former agency employees.The Department of Energy, the Navy, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service also suffered data breaches last year in which personal information was lost or stolen.
She'll get a lot more hits in Google next time she gets bored.
Tags: privacy
