What started as a data theft report last week from ChoicePoint of 35,000 California residents, now turned into at least 145,000 thefts across the nation. According to a company spokesperson, the security breach occurred last fall, but law enforcement officials would not allow them to make public the incident until recently to keep the investigation from being compromised. There have been 750 cases of identity theft resulting from the breach so far. From CNET:
Jones said that ChoicePoint was misled via a detailed effort, as the criminals used previously stolen identities to set up what appeared to be legitimate business licenses, phone numbers and addresses for the organizations they claimed to be when applying for accounts with the company. He said the firm has changed its policies for qualifying new accounts, and will now go as far as having people who are looking to access the company’s databases visit the physical location of firms in order to verify those persons’ legitimacy.
“We’re working hard to deploy new technologies and tighten up the policies and procedures that ChoicePoint already had in place,” Jones said. “It’s always been critical for us to verify that people are who they say they are, but we think that our verification process has already been improved significantly (since the attack).”