Sometimes it is the customers and sometimes it is the employees.  Only in rare cases is it both that get affected by data breaches that seem to keep happening at companies all across America.  The most recent breach took place in Greenville, South Carolina.  This community contains one of the major offices of Charter Communications who recently suffered a data breach that resulted in the theft of numerous laptop computers.  There has been no discussion about how the laptops disappeared or what type of security protection was on them.

One thing that is certain is that the information on the laptops contained personal information on over 9,000 Charter employees around the country.  These records were not only for current workers, but also those no longer employed by the company.  Unfortunately, there is no timeline for when the workers were with Charter, so at this point anyone who worked for the company might be at risk of identity theft.  The company was planning to send out a letter to affected employees, both former and current, although there has been no time table released for this information’s dissemination.  The laptop contained names, addresses, social security numbers, and some bank routing numbers from direct deposit accounts.

At this point, a spokesman for the company said that there is no indication that any of the private information has been used for fraudulent means.  However, experts suggest not taking any chances.  While Charter is providing up to a years worth of free credit monitoring services, some employees are reluctant to enroll in this service.  A former employee, who wished to remain anonymous, said that she did not trust the company to pay for the enrollment because that would involve giving them her personal information again, and Charter has already shown they are not capable of insuring the security of that type of data.

An option for disenchanted workers like this is subscribing themselves into an ID theft service program, such as the one offered by Lifelock.  For only a minimal monthly fee, the company works to provide potential victims of identity theft with some piece of mind.  By establishing contacts with the three major credit bureaus, Trans Union, Experian, and Equifax, Lifelock is ideally situated to stop identity theft before it starts.  One frequent effort by ID thieves is to open up new credit cards or take out loans using the social security number of a victim.  When this information goes to be processed through the credit bureaus, Lifelock temporarily halts it and contacts its customer.  If the customer verifies these applications as legitimate, then they are sent through to continue being reviewed by the bureaus.  However, if the customer says that it is fraudulent activity, Lifelock prevents the applications from going to the review process and consequently prevents identity theft from taking place.