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Red Cross Warns Donors About Breach
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-05-26
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
A former employee of the Red Cross stole personal information obtained from a donor database to open credit card accounts, causing the Red Cross to warn more than 1 million donors in Missouri and Illinois of the problem.
Only about 8,000 donors of the over 1 million being warned of the data theft committed by ex-telephone blood drive recruiter Lonnetta Shanell Medcalf were available to her during her crimes, ComputerWorld reported. The Red Cross alerted the original 8,000 by mail when it was determines Medcalf had criminally used four identities out of that group.
Medcalf's activities took place between October 2005 and March 2006, when the Red Cross discovered her illicit data access and fired her. Medcalf accessed names, phone numbers, birth dates, and Social Security numbers; the report said the Red Cross has updated its systems to keep blood drive recruiters from accessing Social Security numbers.
As a precautionary measure, the Red Cross notified its entire donor base for the Missouri-Illinois region of the incident and advised donors on actions they can take to check their credit reports for unauthorized activity:
This breach does not affect health history information, but "identifying information", including donor names, dates of birth and Social Security Numbers (SSNs), which is contained in the affected database. The incident did not involve hacking from outside the Red Cross. Rather, a Red Cross employee stole donor information. A federal grand jury has indicted the former employee, who used donor identifying information to obtain credit cards and other accounts. The former employee, who passed all background checks prior to employment, is currently awaiting trial.
The Red Cross said initial notifications were sent out on March 17th, but on the advice of federal authorities that other donors may have been affected, decided to follow that up by informing all of its donor members of the case.
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Tag: Red Cross
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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