Update on LexisNexis Privacy & Security Breach

Tuesday 12 April 2005
Today Yahoo News is reporting that a larger pool of U.S. Citizens were impacted by the privacy and security breach reported by LexisNexis last month. For more details on the announced privacy breach you can read my post on the orginal report by Lexis Nexis in March, 2005.

Originally LexisNexis reported that the matter involved only 32,000 individuals but now is reporting that the personal information of 310,00 U.S. citizens may have been stolen.

According to the article, "An investigation by the firm's Anglo-Dutch parent Reed Elsevier determined that its databases had been fraudulently breached 59 times using stolen passwords, leading to the possible theft of personal information such as addresses and Social Security numbers."

LexisNexis issued an April 12, 2005 press release on the results of its preliminary investigation. The press release is titled "LexisNexis Concludes Review of Data Search Activity, Identifying Additional Instances of Illegal Data Access".