CT employees find personal data on state site

This isn't a hack, just sheer stupidity.

The personal information of more than 1,700 Connecticut state employees has been posted on the state's website, some of it since 2003, the state informed employees recetly, the AP reports.

"With all the attention that has been given to similar losses of data at the Veterans Administration and at banks and universities, I would have thought somebody would have been a lot more careful with that information," said Ken Clair, one of the 1,753 state employees who received one of the letters.

Someone in the state goverment included employees' names and Social Security numbers in a page of vendors made available to the public, a spokesman said. The state sometimes sets up special payroll deduction files for workers and then those individuals are identified as "vendors" under certain pay codes. The spokesman said that might explain why someone might end up on a state vendor list.

The letter informed the workers that the list was accessible to the public only when a particular name was searched and not from a menu or specific link. The social security numbers were displayed with no hyphen and had a numerical suffix attached and not easily recognizable.