BALTIMORE — The Maryland Department of Labor is in the process of notifying 78,000 people who may have had their personal information exposed after the agency investigated a potential unauthorized breach of one of the department’s databases.
The Department of Labor announced the potential cyber security attack Friday, saying the breach occurred earlier this year. The Maryland Department of Information Technology conducted an investigation, determining the affected data was stored on the Department of Labor’s Literacy Works Information System and a “legacy unemployment insurance service database,” a statement from the Department of Labor said.
The LWIS files were from 2009, 2010, and 2014, and may include first and last names, social security numbers, dates of birth, city or county of residence, graduation dates, and record numbers, the department said. The files on the unemployment database were from 2013 and may contain first and last names, and social security numbers.
The department said that as of July 5, they have found no evidence that any of the personal information has been “downloaded or extracted from Labor servers,” but the agency is offering customers who may have been affected two years of free credit monitoring through an independent service. Customers who think they may have been affected can email data incident.labor@maryland.gov or call the department's hotline between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday at 410-767-5899. More information can be found on the department’s website.
“We live in an age of highly sophisticated information security threats,” said Acting Labor Secretary James E. Rzepkowski. “We are committed to doing all we can to protect our customers and their information. We strongly urge those impacted to be vigilant about unusual activity on their accounts, and to take advantage of the credit monitoring being offered by the state.”
