Nothing makes the government blush like getting caught with its hand in the cookie jar.  What is even worse is when they set up an organization to deal with identity theft and the head of it soon becomes the victim of a data breach.  Welcome to Norway, where few are happy with the way the government has been addressing the growing spread of ID theft that has started to grip the world.  Yet, this is the exact situation that Georg Apenes finds himself in now.

In a daring hack, over 60,000 Norwegians have been impacted by this most recent breach.  It is the largest to hit the country in a number of years and the more staggering figure is that the 60,000 affected represents over 1.3% of the national population.  The hack did not place on the national level, but came through the communications company Tele2.  The thieves were able to access the network systems to procure the personal identity numbers of people and also their addresses.  With this information, they are able to order goods online for people, access credit card information, and change addresses so that they can get in the mail any of the illegal goods that they are ordering in other peoples’ names.

At this time, no one has reported severe results because of the breach.  It is being speculated at this point by officials within the government’s ID theft prevention agency that Georg Apenes received something just to bring to everyone’s attention how lacking the security was at certain important companies in the country.  Indeed, Tele2 has been cited numerous times that its security and network systems needed to be upgraded to prevent this time of incident.  A spokesman for the company said that they have been working to improve their security measures, but now ill bring in outside consultants from the continent to help them get up to speed quickly.  They also have vowed that nothing of this sort will happen to their company again.

In the United States, stories of this nature have more and more people worrying about their own security.  As a result, individuals are taking matters into their own hands, rather than relying on the companies they interact with to provide ever continuing upgrades to their security systems.  One way that people are able to do this is to subscribe to ID theft services.  One of the most popular of these companies is Lifelock.  They maintain contacts with all three major credit bureaus, Trans Union, Experian, and Equifax.  Whenever a new loan or credit card application comes into be processed, it is temporarily held up.  Lifelock then calls its customer to see if they actually submitted the forms or if someone is attempting a fraudulent activity.  If fraud is determined, then the application is stopped and identity theft is prevented before it starts.  This is always a positive because there are countless examples of people who have been victims of ID theft and spend years trying to correct the matter with little positive result.

Tags: Equifax, lifelock

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Corporate Breaches, Individuals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.