If you’re looking for a job, you already know it’s a tough market right now. Accompanying the bad news about job availability are warnings that identity thieves are reaping the benefits by posing as job recruiters, or hacking job databases.

Unfortunately, there’s another example of the latter.

Aetna sent letters last week to 65,000 current and former employees warning that their Social Security numbers may have been compromised in a breach of the company’s Web site.

The site used for online applications holds the names, phone numbers, email and postal addresses of up to 450,000 applicants, but the Social Security numbers aren’t stored on that site.

The data breach came to light when people began complaining about receiving phishing email purportedly from Aetna. The senders stated the email was sent in response to job inquiry and requested more information.

The hackers were obviously able to steal email addresses, but Aetna spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said they still don’t know if Social Security numbers were also stolen.

A similar breach occurred in January when Monster.com was compromised by hackers. Monster.com serves as a job search portal for millions of people all over the worlds, and as listing website for USAJOBS, the source for job information with the United States Office of Personnel Management.

Monster.com was also breached twice in 2007 when hackers gained access to 1.3 million resumes stored in the database, and later that year when site pages were injected with malicious code that infected site users with malware.