Identity Theft
I’m a student at Regis University, and I’m using student loans from Sallie Mae to pay for the schooling. One of my loans was sold to Nelnet, and they recently lost a tape with student information on it. They were using UPS to ship an unencrypted tape to another facility. UPS lost the tape along the way, and that puts the rest of my financial future at risk. I hope for Nelnet’s sake that nothing bad happens with the tape. If I’m put out by their carelessness, then I see a lawsuit in their future.
I’m not a big fan of lawsuits. Lawsuits over hot coffee, getting fat at McDonalds, or similar items where the plaintiff had control over the situation, but chose to be careless make my stomach churn. However, in a case of gross negligence (like shipping an insecure piece of information via an insecure method) deserves to be handled in a different manner. I just hope that it doesn’t go that far.
Now I’ve got to spend money, effort, time, and worry over someone else’s mistake. I’ve got to sign up for reports from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to make sure that nothing bad happens to my credit. My credit is pretty good. Kiara and I have worked over the past several years to keep things good on our credit, and I would hate to see all of that hard work go down the tubes because of someone else’s carelessness.
The letter that Nelnet sent me told me to watch my credit reports for the next 12 to 24 months. That’s two years worth of diligence that I have to maintain because they didn’t encrypt data on a tape. Their letter also said that it was a “specialized tape” that could not easily be read. I know about tape drives. I own two, I’ve worked with dozens in the past. It’s not that hard to get your hands on the proper tape reader and read the tape. Since the data wasn’t encrypted, fetching names, Social Security numbers, addresses, and other vital information off of the tape would be trivial. I can write a quick Perl script to just do that in under an hour. It’s really not all that hard.
Here’s to hoping that nothing bad comes about from this…
