As many as 21,000 students who applied for federal student financial aid may have had their personal data compromised after an error with the U.S. Department of Education’s Financial Student Aid web site showed other users’ personal data to logged in users, the department said.
The data breach occurred as a result of a routine software upgrade carried out Sunday by the Web site vendor, Affiliated Computer Services Inc. of Dallas, Texas, which will provide free credit monitoring services for one year for those affected.
The department said that the 21,000 users, less than half of one percent of the 6.4 million registered users, who accessed the site to view their financial aid information from Sunday night through Tuesday morning may have seen personal financial information for other people instead of their own, including name, birthdate, Social Security number, and possibly other data.
“We have disabled the Web site and will not put it back up until it is 100 percent fixed and certain that it won’t happen again,” [said Education spokeswoman Jane Glickman]. . . .
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), co-chair of the Privacy Caucus, criticized the Bush administration for the lax security on its watch. He sought information from Education secretary Margaret Spellings about the impact on borrowers and urged credit monitoring.
“From veterans to on-duty military personnel and now to student loan borrowers, the Bush administration has made breaches of privacy a regular occurrence and a signature of its tenure in Washington,†Markey said in the letter dated yesterday. — Government Computer News
The data breach is the latest in a long line of government computer security incidents this year.
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Karl Marx would love the popular moves among politicians in various state governments and the federal government to ban so-called "junk" food in schools, and to "put healthy food in" convenience stores and on the tables of those they define as poor. It's a very elitist and arrogant mindset that promotes this ideology, and it needs to be addressed.
Ultimately, the war supporters in Congress prevailed in the vote on the resolution. Still, the vote was significant because it places every member of Congress on the record as supporting or not supporting the unconstitutional, costly, violent occupation of a country that never attacked us. This vote should serve as an important reminder to the American people of where their representatives really stand when it comes to policing the world, empire building, and war.
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Rob Davidson
Aug 25, 2006
I crack up all the time at the thought of these incompetent S.O.B.’s having the cajones to tell the rest of us what we must do to safeguard patient/client/customer information from identity thieves. The government creates the conditions for identity theft in the first, and they are the worst offenders when it comes to leaking peoples’ information.