VA Drops Credit Offer After FBI Says Data Is Safe
By: Jaikrishna Vijayan (Computerworld)
July 24, 2006
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs last week withdrew
its offer to pay
for one year's worth of credit-monitoring services for the
26.5 million
veterans and active-duty personnel whose data was exposed in
the security
breach at the VA.
The decision to cancel the offer was made because of the
"high degree" of
confidence expressed by the FBI that the data hadn't been
accessed or
compromised, VA Secretary R. James Nicholson testified at a
Senate committee
hearing last Thursday. The FBI, which recovered the stolen
equipment on June
29, issued a final report to the VA on its evaluation of the
data last week.
Nicholson said that instead of paying for credit-monitoring
services, the VA
will soon retain an identity risk management and
fraud-monitoring company to
track whether any of the data is being misused.
The credit-monitoring cost had been pegged at $160.5
million. Nicholson
wouldn't specify what the VA expects to pay to monitor for
fraud. But, he
said, "it is surprisingly inexpensive."
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(Sorry for the long link, I'll start providing suplemental
tinyurl URLs)
Daniel Jimenez
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