Consumer database penetrated by thieves
By The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO -- A company that collects consumer data warned thousands of Californians that thieves penetrated the company's computer network and may have stolen credit reports, Social Security numbers and other sensitive information.
ChoicePoint Inc., which sells such data to government agencies and a variety of companies, acknowledged Tuesday that several people broke into its computer database and purloined data from as many as 35,000 Californians.
Last fall, con artists apparently used previously stolen identities to create what appeared to be legitimate businesses seeking ChoicePoint accounts, said Chuck Jones, a spokesman for the Alpharetta, Ga.-based company.
They opened about 50 accounts and received volumes of data on consumers, including names and addresses, important identification numbers and job histories.
The attack appears to have resulted in at least six cases of identity theft in Los Angeles County. It's unclear whether the data of people outside California was exposed.
But law enforcement agents, who have arrested one person on six counts of theft, say hundreds of thousands of Americans elsewhere may be at risk.
ChoicePoint has not notified consumers in other states, nor is it working with law enforcement agents elsewhere, Jones said.
"California is the focus of the investigation, and we don't have any evidence to indicate at this point that the situation has spread beyond California," Jones said. "If at some point in time we get information that it's in other areas, we'll revisit the disclosure."
Jones said ChoicePoint officials do not define the data theft as a hacking _ a term typically used to describe breaches of a company's operating system or some other part of its network.
In this case, professional con artists used stolen identities to open legitimate accounts and receive information from ChoicePoint's extensive consumer databases.
Security experts said the attack still exploited a vulnerability _ the company's apparent inability to distinguish real businesses from dummies.
They also dismissed the notion that the data thieves would limit their attack geographically.
"I've never heard of a hacker doing something just to make a company comply with a state statute- that's ridiculous," said Nick Akerman, partner and co-chairman of the computer fraud division of law firm Dorsey and Whitney.
"It'd be like robbing a bank that wasn't FDIC insured so the robber wouldn't have to be prosecuted by the FBI."