1,000 Atlanta Firefighters Learn Personal Information Exposed On Internet

From WSBTV, April 13

ATLANTA, GA– A thousand Atlanta firefighters just found out their personal information was posted on the internet. Now the city is investigating how it got there. Firefighters found out about the breach when the city sent them a letter offering free credit monitoring.

Other city leaders found out about the leak because Atlanta police officers were at a security seminar, and the presenter happened to use the list of Atlanta firefighters as an example of the things you can find on the Internet.

"It's probably not very often that you're used as an example of a security breach, so I’m sure they were just as shocked as we were to find out, " said Stephen Hill with the Atlanta Firefighters Union.

The list of names with addresses and social security numbers was found in a peer to peer sharing site. The city knows it was taken from a city employee's laptop, via the Internet. The laptop was not operating on the city's secure network at the time.

"There was a lot of concern over who did it, and why they did it. Quite honestly I believe all the city workers are taxed. People are working from home which means files are gonna be transferred," Hill told Channel 2’s Jodie Fleischer.

Hill doesn't think it was anything sinister on the part of an employee, but the city is investigating who took the information and how. It's since been removed from the Internet and the city sent the firefighters a letter offering free credit monitoring for a year. So far there are no reports of the information being used.