Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Another VA Computer Gone Missing

You may remember the May 3rd theft of a laptop from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee. - Jesus Alex Pineda, 19, and Christian Brian Montano, 19, of Rockville, Maryland, were charged with burglary and theft and Montano received an additional charge of conspiracy to commit burglary and theft. They apparently did not know what they were stealing when they broke into the home and at least five other burglaries in the neighborhood might have been linked to these alleged hooligans.

A juvenile may also have been involved. His name wasn't released because of his age. (I wonder why they did not release the parents names?)

Quite a HooDoo a few months back that had quite a few feds running around the neighborhood which I'm sure made Jesus and Christian very uncomfortable.
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This time it is a desktop computer stolen from the Reston, Virginia offices of Unysis a contractor for the VA.

The computer had veterans' names, addresses, Social Security numbers and birth dates, as well as insurance carriers, billing information and details of military service.

Affected are 5,000 patients of a Philadelphia VA Medical Center, about 11,000 from Pittsburgh, Pa., and about 2,000 deceased patients and perhaps as much as 20,000 more.

Unisys is fully cooperating with the investigation. The building was a fairly secure facility and the computer needed a password to boot up and another to access the files.

Unisys spokesperson Lisa Meyer said in a prepared statement."Unisys will be working with VA regarding the notification of potentially affected veterans and the offering of credit monitoring. The company will continue to work with the VA and law enforcement to address this incident..."

Hopefully it will be found out that some innocent tech took the machine to his dungeon workshop to switch out the video card. In the meantime if you are a vet in the PA area that has been to VA hospitals you might want to call 'em up and make sure your name is not on the list. And watch your bank/credit info.


For more on this story - Click here -

Keep up to speed on Fraud, Phishing and Financial Misdeeds! who posted on this story here.




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