CHOICE POINT PAYS FINE FOR 2008 DATA BREACH
PC World‘s Grant Gross (IDG News Service) is reporting that the data broker Choice Point has agreed to increase its data security efforts and pay a fine after a second data breach occurred in 2008. The 2008 data breach reportedly involved the personal information of 13,750 people. Choice Point’s first publicly acknowledged data breach occurred in 2004 and that data breach reportedly affected more than 160,000 U.S. residents.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Choice Point is for $275,000 for failing to implement a comprehensive information security program to protect consumers’ personal information, as required by the federal agency after the 2004 breach. According to the FTC, Choice Point turned off an electronic security tool used to monitor access to one of its databases, and failed to detect that the security tool was turned off for four months.