The new finance director for Pulaski Country Special School District has identified Tasha Thompson as the source of missing personal information, including Social Security numbers, for one thousand one hundred former and current district teachers and other employees.  She was a deputy finance district earlier this year with the school district when she loaded the private information onto her own personal computer.  She did this to take home work to finish but when she left her job last fall she still had the information on her personal computer.

According to the District spokesman the downloading of confidential personal data was not in violation of any state law but was a school district policy violation.  The data was not supposed to be on any computer but district computers because they have protection against hackers.  On November 11th, the laptop was stolen but she did not notify the district about the theft until a few weeks later.

At this time the district is not aware of any of the data being misused but have warned all whose personal information was on the computer to monitor their Social Security and credit card information to make sure that they do not become a victim of identity theft.  The computer has still not been found.

It was announced on Tuesday the final results of a huge national sweep used to crack down on suspected identity theft perpetrators.  This is a part of effort that has been stepped up against identity theft and refund fraud.  The two departments that conducted this sweep were the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service.  Working together along with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office this giant sweep targeted in twenty-three states a total of one hundred five people last week and was from coast-to-coast.

There were executions of search warrants, arrests, and indictments included in the sweep involving the potential theft of several thousand taxpayer refunds and of identities stolen.  All total there were nine hundred thirty nine criminal charges in the sixty-nine indictments and information that was related to identity theft.

Investigators and auditors from the IRS also conducted long compliance visits in nine locations across the United States to check-cashing businesses during that same time frame.  The officials make about one hundred fifty visits to help make sure these check-cashing businesses were not facilitating identity theft and refund fraud.

The IRS and the Justice Department are working together to not only investigate but also to prosecute and punish any type of tax refund criminal act that was committed using the theft of someone else’s identity.  The IRS is also increasing its internal reviews in order to spot tax returns that are frauds before they issue a tax refund and to help any of the people who have been victims of identity theft tax refund schemes.

This sweep that was done reflects on investigative efforts that go back months and in some cases, even years.

Over the weekend, the online shoe retailer Zappos informed their customers that they had been a victim of a cyber attack.  This cyber attack affected more than twenty-four million customers.  Zappos is owned by Amazon.com and is based in Las Vegas, Nevada.  They have stated that these twenty-four million customers have had their email addresses, their names, their billing and shipping addresses, their phone numbers, scrambled passwords, and the last four numbers of their credit cards were hacked.

Although this sounds really bad for the customers, there is one piece of good news.  The hackers were not able to access servers that had the customer’s payment data, including their total critical credit card number.  The retailer has stated that the hacker managed to gain access to parts of their internal systems and network.  The hacker managed to do this via one of the servers in Kentucky.  This was posted Sunday on Zappos blog.

It is the recommendation that all their customers, not just the twenty-four million who were affected, that they change their password. In addition, they should also do this on any site where they used a similar or same password to protect any other accounts they might have.

Because of their huge customer data base and all the calls they are expecting because of this data breach, they have switched off their telephones temporarily.  They are asking that all customers contact the company via email.

A group of cyber hackers from Eastern Europe calling themselves Rove have hijacked computer totaling approximately four million.  These hijacked computers can be found in over one hundred countries.  Approximately a half million of those computers are in the United States.  The group of cyber thieves made off with fourteen million dollars in illegal income before the cyber hackers was caught. 

In this sophisticated and massive scheme, the malware that was allegedly used to infect computers in the government of the United States also included NASA.  Websites of major institutions were also targeted.  Some of these websites included the IRS, iTunes, and Netflix.  When these websites were hijacked, users trying to access these sites were force to entirely different websites. 

The hackers that were accused of this cyber crime included a Russian national and six Estonian nationals.  They pulled off the hijacking by rerouting traffic on the internet illegally on the computers that were infected so they could gain profits from advertisement deals on the internet for the past four years.  The international cyber ring was busted by the FBI after a investigation of two years. 

The alleged hackers worked out of their home countries but they also used entities all over the world and in the United States.  They also used an Estonia based software company called Rove Digital to carry out the hijacking.  Apparently the cyber crime got their name from this software company.

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In San Antonio, Texas, Jason Miller, an instructional assistant, has been fired due to being charged with identity theft.  The instructional assistant had access to forms that this particular school district, Northside Independent School District, used to authorize criminal background checks.  The background checks were used for people who want to volunteer at the school.  In the stack that was found, there were the eight alleged victim’s names.  Now the school district is limiting who has access to these forms.

People who wanted to volunteer at the school did have the option of completing the form online or printing it out.  Now they can only do it online.  Apparently the instructional assistant had asked Taylor Stakes to be a judge at the high school’s debate tournament in September and apparently had his identity stolen by Jason Miller.

Taylor Stakes stated that he gave the instructional assistant a tax form on the background authorization form when he came in to be the judge at the tournament.  He was filed in about the illegal activity and having is identity stolen by the Live Oak detectives.

Mr. Miller had been going to various payday loan locations and getting payday loans in Mr. Stake’s name.  Mr. Miller then opened checking accounts, deposited the money he had borrowed, and then pulled it out and put it in his checking account.  The instructional assistant did confess to stealing Taylor Stake’s information.