FULLERTON – Police filed possession of stolen property charges Tuesday against a prison parolee who was arrested for having a computer – with more than 40,000 names, addresses and Social Security numbers of California residents, Sgt. Linda King said.
Todd Irvine, 43, was taken into custody after Fullerton detectives served a search warrant at his La Habra residence in the 700 block of La Serna Avenue.
A window-smash-style commercial burglary of Systematic Automation Inc., a data processing firm in Fullerton, occurred Feb. 11, King said. Irvine was arrested Friday.
The firm prints individualized annual statements customized for employees with a summary of their health and other employee benefits. Nineteen companies, Systematic Automation customers, had employee information stored on the stolen hard drive.
Some of the larger companies included the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Modesto City School District.
Fullerton detectives learned the stolen computer had been accessing the Internet. Detectives located an IP address for the computer on La Serna Avenue in La Habra.
Several other computers were recovered at the location.
Investigators are analyzing the computer to determine if the employee information files had been compromised. At this time, no related cases of identity theft have been reported, King said.
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This article contains very interesting information, but the issues which are not talked about paint a different picture.
Was the data encrypted? Most likely not...or they would have said that.
Did the person access or copy the information? Who knows, because the criminal could have booted and done whatever he wanted with the computer (or its data) as long as he didn't connect to the internet. Clearly, he is unaware of these type of commercial protection systems. This means he isn't a high-tech criminal.....just your normal window-smash-style type of criminal.
In my mind, this greatly reduces the chance of any information foul play or misuse.
But don't let the police fool you, if his guy knew what he was doing...or what he had...they wouldn't have got it back. They were lucky.
It wasn't that long ago that Veterans were placed in danger of identity theft when a contract employee's laptop computer was stolen. This is scary that information is not safe because computers are being taken out of the office. For more info
ReplyDeletehttp://www.identitytheftsecrets.com/veterans-what-you-should-know-to-prevent-and-recov.html