14 DAY TRIAL // Members of Idaho National Guard might be risking identity theft now after a thumb drive has been stolen from one officer's car. It all happened in Boise, the largest city and capital of Idaho.
The small device contained a lot of data, that regarded more than 3.000 guard members across the state, as according to KTVB. All of the people whose information was on that drive have been alerted because the National Guard is not taking any chances. It is very unlikely that the little gadget had been stolen for the data on it rather than for its value as a second hand gizmo, but still, it is better to be prepared.
The National Guard is doing something to help the affected members, as in setting up a website and opening a new hotline that the soldiers can use, and that is not all, they will also keep an eye out to see if anything fishy is going to happen with their accounts, as seen on KTVB. Also members that are going to change their data are bound to be out of any danger regarding possible ID theft, but as said before, it is unlikely for the thieves' target to be the soldiers' identities.
Nowadays, ID theft is done via the Internet which is a prolific market. Millions of spam messages infected with trojans and a lot of scam sites and phishing pages as well are deployed by hackers in order to help them steal identities. Rarely will one use such a hard way to accomplish things when it is much easier to do it over the net. There is also another thing - there have been a lot of car burglaries, the Police had to put up lately with in the Lake Forest Drive zone, where this has happened as well. This makes me think even more that the thieves were not after the sensitive information, so the NG members IDs might be safe.