I’m sure the state of Oklahoma is good at doing a lot of things, but protecting its citizens’ personal and financial information certainly isn’t one of them.
Last week the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency notified officials that a laptop containing personal information of 225,000 Oklahomans was stolen from an employee’s home. Among the information lost in the data breach were the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, tax identification numbers and birth dates of clients of the Section 8 Housing Voucher Program.
If this were their first major data breach, forgiveness might come more easily, but these idiots have lost more than 1,226,560 records already this year, and there are only 3.5 million people in the entire state!
Other Oklahoma data breaches SO FAR this year:
April 23
- Oklahoma Department of Human Services
- 1,000,000 affected
- Data breach attributed to laptop stolen from state employee. Computer files included the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of DHS services recipients.
March 7
- Oklahoma Department of Human Services
- Unknown number affected
- DHS child welfare worker left behind files when evicted from rental house. Information included names, Social Security numbers, contact information and details pertaining to child abuse investigations.
March 3
- Western Oklahoma State College
- 1,500 affected
- Computer breach exposed Social Security numbers and other information of library users.
In 2008, the state government lost or exposed the information of 85,597 constituents in three separate data breaches.