Virus causes data breach at state websites
Personal information about as many as 210,000 Massachusetts residents may have been stolen from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development after hundreds of the agency’s computers were infected with a computer worm.
“Unfortunately, like many government and non-government organizations we were targeted by criminal hackers who penetrated our system with a new strain of a virus,” said Joanne F. Goldstein, the commonwealth’s secretary of labor and workforce development, in a statement released this afternoon. “All steps possible are being taken to avoid any future recurrence.” The state believes the actual number of affected residents is much lower than 210,000.
About 1,500 computers in the departments of Unemployment Assistance and Career Services and at the state’s One Stop Career Centers were infected with a computer virus called W32.QAKBOT, which is designed to allow an attacker to take control of infected computers and to steal information stored on the machines.
The agency first detected the presence of the virus on April 20, and took immediate steps to disinfect its machines. But yesterday, the agency said that the virus “was not remediated as originally believed and that the persistence of the virus resulted in a data breach.”