14 DAY TRIAL // A letter from Multi-State Billing Services LLC informed that the personal details of some children who received Medicaid reimbursements have been exposed to criminals.
Parents of the children affected by the incident were officially informed on June 25 that a laptop of a Multi-State Billing Services had been stolen from their locked vehicle.
The computer contained Social Security numbers and Medicaid identification numbers of nearly 3,000 students from Massachusetts and 446 from Vermont, according to The Milford Daily News.
The publication says that access to the computer system was protected by a password, but the storage device did not benefit from encryption, which means that the sensitive information could be extracted.
Given that the device was stolen from a locked vehicle, the criminal may not have been aware of the data available or its importance.
Multi-State Billing Services does not have any evidence that the data has been compromised in any way, but as a precaution, it advises the parents to place a security freeze on the credit accounts of their children; the costs for placing and lifting the security freeze is to be reimbursed to the parents.
To avoid the risk of data exposure should this type of incidents occur in the future, the company enforced encryption of sensitive information on portable devices.