Feds Fixing Glitch in Student Loan Data Breach

by Mike Bevel, CollectionIndustry.com

Computers. If they?re not going mad while softly crooning ?Daisy? (after killing a spaceship?s-worth of secondary characters) or accidentally waging nuclear war against Russia (oh Matthew Broderick; once you were young and less?puffy) ? they?re still mucking things up.

In yet another in a long line of computer-related security breaches, the Education Department is in the position of having to offer as many as 21,000 students free credit reports after the borrowers? personal data were compromised during a ?routine software update.?

Affiliated Computer Services, Inc., a Dallas, TX-based contractor, was in charge of the software update. In the process, data for different borrowers were mixed up, causing folks who logged on to the site ? www.dissonline.com ? to inadvertently see someone else?s data.

“We’re not pleased and we take this incident very seriously,” Terri Shaw, the department’s chief operating officer for federal student aid, told the Associated Press. “We’ve asked ACS to determine how this glitch was missed in the testing process so we can make sure we fill that gap.”

So far, there have been no reports of identity theft from any of the student loan holders. In recent months, at least eight other government agencies have reported data breaches. The biggest was the loss of a laptop and external drive containing information for 26.5 million veterans and active-duty troops. That equipment, lost by a Department of Veterans Affairs employee, has since been recovered.

If y?all think things are going to get better with the advent of robots ? I?d like to go on record as being one of the first naysayers.