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May 22, 2006 2:50 PM PDT
Veterans' data swiped in theft
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According to a message posted on the department's Web site on Monday, one of the department's data analysts violated procedure by taking home the information without authorization. The information was stored on a laptop, according to Avivah Litan, a security analyst for research firm Gartner. Law enforcement agencies have launched a search, the department said.
The message also said that besides Social Security numbers, data lost included dates of birth for veterans and some of their wives. The employee whose house was robbed was placed on administrative leave.
The number of Social Security numbers involved means this could be one of the largest thefts of SSNs ever. But in no way is the theft of Social Security numbers uncommon. Just this month, Ohio University announced that data thieves broke into three of the school's computer servers and accessed 200,000 Social Security numbers belonging to students and alumni.
Others who have suffered the loss of such information are the Metropolitan State College in Denver, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Los Angeles' Department of Social Services, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
Because of the growing number of Social Security number thefts, Gartner has advised businesses to stop relying on SSNs as "the ultimate identifier" of individuals, says Litan, the firm's security analyst.
"If you add up all these thefts, we estimate that one out of seven Social Security numbers is in criminal hands," Litan said. "Or the numbers are in the hands of illegal immigrants or are sitting somewhere in a chat room. You can't rely on them anymore."
The good news for Veterans Affairs is that the crooks may not know what they have.
"It is possible that (the thieves) remain unaware of the information which they posses or of how to make use of it," Veterans Affairs said on the Web site.
Gartner's Litan agrees. Studies have shown that thefts of computers storing sensitive data have resulted in only a small percentage of identity theft, she says. And she added that information on millions of veterans would not necessarily yield much loot.
"Frankly, veterans don't have a lot of money," Litan said. "They aren't typically wealthy people. Criminals aren't going to be taking out 26 million loans (in the names of the veterans whose information was stolen). That's a lot of information, and the thieves have time constraints just like everybody else. They want information on the wealthiest individuals."
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My cousin just came back to Savannah after a tour in Iraq. This is the last thing she or her spouse want to deal with. Getting back to a "regular" life is hard enough to now have to add ID theft to the matter.
My cousin just came back to Savannah after a tour in Iraq. This is the last thing she or her spouse want to deal with. Getting back to a "regular" life is hard enough to now have to add ID theft to the matter.
The Gartner Group employee had a lot of nerve. I'm sure Norman Schwarzkopf will be glad to know that he isn't worth enough for someone to steal his money or ruin his reputation.
with the veterans' SSN's, there's a good chance most of them receive a regular government check that is direct deposited into a bank account. it's hard enough to get a single SSn of a millionaire, but having 27 million SSN's of a group that has a 10% chance that they get regular guaranteed monthly checks of around $1000 (plus or minus a few hundread) then you potentially have millions. veterans also tend to have better credit than average working class folks, so the value of a veteran's SSN here is being far under stated.
There are millions of veterans who are military retirees, and they certainly have a significant chunk of their income to lose (the largest single line item in the DoD budget is retiree pay, i.e., hundreds of billions of dollars). Disabled veterans get significant amounts of money, the vast majority of which goes toward rehabilitation and related costs (travel, equipment, medical testing material, and on, and on - my father is a 100% disabled WW-II vet, and I've spent my entire adult life paying for expenses not covered by his disability payments, which are substantial).
Every veteran is entitled to up to $359,000 in a no-down-payment loan to buy a home - it doesn't take very many of those loans, acquired through fraud, to add up to a huge amount of money for which the affected veterans wind up on the hook, and when they can't pay, all of the taxpayers foot the bill. When their credit is ruined and the bad loan winds up replicated in thousands of databases, they can wind up on taxpayer-funded subsistence.
There is potentially a huge amount of money involved in exploitation of this data, and the comment that veterans don't make much money is an absolutely falacious assumption, and frankly, perpetuates a completely inaccurate stereotype of veterans being helpless invalids with minimal capacity to achieve anything significant with their lives. About 10 percent of veterans are former officers who all have college educations and another few percent of veterans are current or former enlisted personnel who have used their veterans educational benefits to achieve college education. A disproportionate number of leaders in business and government are veterans who quietly carry on with their personal and professional lives without making a lot of noise about their background. There's a very good reason why business people have long embraced military principle - witness the popularity of Sun Tzu's writings many millenia after his demise, among many more authors with military experience, who have successfully applied it to the business environment.
Being a well-paid professional working in SillyCon Valley, I'm certainly concerned about my personal data falling into the hands of criminals (although, given the cost of living here, good luck to anyone being able to take out a loan, or even get a credit card with a $300 limit, using my name and SSN!
The people who made the statement about veterans not having much money, and the "journalists" who allowed it to be perpetuated, need to apologize to hard-working veterans everywhere, who continue to make their way of life and freedom even possible, in the largest public forums that exist.
All the Best,
Joe Blow
Citizen
Guardian
Veteran
It is a sad state of affairs that an agency I rely on for healthcare (I can't afford private insurance), supposedly dedicated to veterans, could allow my very honor to be stolen. To think that even as I am writing this, some cretin is probably using my personal info to defraud somebody else is unfathomable. Just as bad, that will eventually come back on me...and I will be obligated to pay money I don't have!