Supreme Court Justice Among 2000 Screwed by Investment firm

According to Brian Krebs of the WaPo, an employee of a local DC area investment firm installed Limewire on her work computer and then shared out her whole hard drive. Then enterprising identity thieves stole the names, addresses and social security numbers of 2000 clients of the company, including Justice Stephen Breyer. And he goes on to report that the thieves have been hard at work stealing cash and opening up new lines of credit.

From the WaPo here:

Sometime late last year, an employee of a McLean investment firm decided to trade some music, or maybe a movie, with like-minded users of the online file-sharing network LimeWire while using a company computer. In doing so, he inadvertently opened the private files of his firm, Wagner Resource Group, to the public.

That exposed the names, dates of birth and Social Security numbers of about 2,000 of the firm’s clients, including a number of high-powered lawyers and Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

The breach was not discovered for nearly six months. A reader of washingtonpost.com’s Security Fix blog found the information while searching LimeWire in June.

Reader Christopher Lynt, a patent attorney from Virginia whose personal data was included in the file exposed via P2P, told me that last July, an identity thief used his SSN and birth date to have $1,000 wired to Mexico from Lynt’s bank and credit accounts.

The company looks to be a small cabal of DC lawyers scheming on some investments. This goes to show that even small companies must work to protect critical files- and someone is certain to get sued over this.