Letter Sent to SC Residents After Security Breach

Finally, three months after the incident. SC residents are recieving a notice in the mail with instructions on how to protect our identity and banking information after a savvy overseas hacker broke into our servers and stole approximately 3.6 million tax records. The letter informs the recipient of the recent breach and that their information including social security numbers, credit card information, and banking routing numbers may be at risk. Although I have yet to recieve a letter personally, three of my closest neighbors including my grandmother got the letter in the mail today. So far I am noticing a lot of inconsistencies and potential problems with how the state of SC is handling this. I should say though, I would have expected the federal government to offer more help or show concern since this is supposedly the largest cybersecurity attack on any one single state. First, I don't think the majority of people such as my grandmother, who recently turned 86, understand the nature of the letter. Immediately she thought that me or my uncle had taken one of her credit cards and ran up some bogus charges on the internet leading to a case of stolen identity. Ironically, my neighbor's wife, who is much younger, accused her husband of doing the same with her bank debit card. Although the wording is pretty clear in the letter in my opinion, it seems that many are misinterpreting the content and it appears to invole some sense of guilt or fear as if they have done something wrong. Second, the resolution the state of SC has provided will ultimately cost its tax payers $12 million dollars the last I heard. Although at some point the taxpayers will pick up the bill for this expenditure, in the letter we are told this service is provided free through the state. The service itself is one year free credit monitoring through Experian. The only problem is you have to sign up yourself Apparently the state did not think it would be wise to automatically start monitering peoples credit or protect them from identity theft. That leaves a large population of elderly and those who don't use the internet at the mercy of another misleading government document that they may or may not take seriously. I have a better idea. Why don't we make a law that says you have to encrypt personal information on government computers? Take the $12 million and buy some new servers and train some monkees that know how to password protect files. No wonder the IRS has thousands of fraudulent tax claims a year due to stolen social security numbers. Maybe our next president will have a the social security number of a dead SC resident like the one we have now. Or better yet, just give our private information to Russian and Chinese hackers and save them the trouble.