Wisconsin’s Sun Prairie city suffered from a data breach

For almost two months of 2019, an unauthorized party was having illegitimate access to email accounts of some employees working for Sun Prairie city of Wisconsin.

These compromised email accounts contain sensitive information such as account logins as well as passwords, Social Security numbers, state identification numbers, drivers' licenses, bank as well as financial account numbers, payment card information and medical information.

"The City undertook a lengthy and labor-intensive process to identify the personal information contained in the affected email accounts," said the press release issued on June 25, 2019, by the Sun Prairie city comprising of roughly 30,000 people. In a security notice, the city said that "while the investigation was unable to confirm what, if any, information that was accessed within the affected email accounts, the City is notifying individuals in an abundance of caution because we have confirmed that certain information was present in the affected email accounts".

As per Sun Prairie city, it was around March 6, 2019, when for the first-time the city came to know about suspicious activity involving email account of an employee. As a result, the city has hired forensics experts to conduct a detailed investigation in order to determine the scope and nature of the incident. The forensics investigation finally revealed that email accounts of several employees have been affected between Jan. 16, 2019, and Mar. 6, 2019, by the breach.

The Sun Prairie city is now reviewing as well as updating security measures on their systems, in order to avoid such kind of incidents from taking place in the future. Additionally the city is notifying the possibly impacted individuals regarding the incident, and advised them to stay vigilant as well as watch out for fraud and identity theft incidents. Sun Prairie also advised them to review the credit reports and account statements for any kind of suspicious activity.

Sun Prairie city said that "the city has security measures, policies, and procedures in place to protect the data on its systems and it continues to review and update these measures as part of our ongoing commitment to the security of the information in our care".

» SPAMfighter News - 7/16/2019