LifeLock Blog

Parents and students in Utah’s new Canyons School District might be looking forward to back to school sales, but this year, 6,000 school employees have to worry that identity thieves might be shopping on their dime.

The district offices sent out notification letters last Friday, telling the employees about a lost USB flash drive that holds 6,000 employees’ addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and Social Security numbers.

Apparently, a district-level employee had a legitimate purpose for storing the data on the flash drive, but maybe has a little bit of a problem with short-term memory. “At, this point we have no reason to believe the information was stolen or used to perpetuate fraud or identity theft,” said Jennifer Toomer-Cook, spokeswoman for the district.

To their credit, the school district mailed the notification letters only two days after the data breach was reported. The letters provided employees with a Web address where they can initiate a 90-day fraud alert or credit freeze, but didn’t mention anything about their paying for their employees’ credit monitoring or identity theft protection services.

And they did try to assuage the concerns of district employees by saying they are working to improve security policies and building a secure network for file transfers.

Unfortunately, those changes are too late for the employees left at risk of identity theft.

“ID theft is the designer crime of the day. Of all the people I trust with my information, my employer is paramount. So, yes, I am concerned,” said Margot McCallum, a middle school teacher.

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