I received a letter today marked “Urgent message from IBM. Please open immediately”. What’s this I thought? It turns out my information relating to my IBM employment was on the tapes lost back in February. I had read about the incident some time ago when it became public back in April.
At the time I figured I couldn’t be involved, because I hadn’t already been offered this free id-protection for a year. Turns out they just took a month and a half to notify me after it became public knowledge (3 and a half after it happened). Nice job all around IBM.
We received one of these too. Thinking it would be a clever scam and wondering if we should respond or ignore or pursue and turn them in… Or is this legit? No way to tell short of calling IBM. Number for Kroll is in the mail and will call but still…
So what does that mean now? Do you have to go and change a bunch of your crap?
I got the same letter, at first I thought it was a scam by the company offering the Identity Theft protection. I worked in Clearwater, FL for IBM back in 2000-2001 for Global Services. Was this a regional or divisional problem for IBM? I am contacting friends to see how many people were involved. It is ironic this happened RIGHT after the notices for suing over lost overtime went out to IBM employees?
I just went through a pile of mail and found the same letter. Ironically, I never worked for IBM, although I did work for Lotus but left just before IBM acquired them in 1995.
Like Lynn, I’ll be checking this thing every which way to make sure it’s not scam.
I was employee from 1997-2000 in Connecticut and I got one too. Sounds like they lost a lot of data at least for those years. Looking up Kroll on the web it appears legit. The description of them on wikipedia dates back to 2005 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroll_Inc and has a history of valid updates.
I too was surprised to get a letter from IBM since I never worked for IBM. I worked for Lotus from 1988-1991. IBM bought Lotus in 1995. IBM confirmed with me that this was how IBM acquired my personal data and a lot of others’ data. Identity theft is a huge problem and IBM’s offer of one year of credit reporting falls far short. It doesn’t match the risk period. And there are other problems. I blog about all of this at http://www.ivebeenmugged.typepad.com
George
I received IBM’s data breach notice in May 2007. I was surprised since I never worked for IBM. (IBM got my personal data when they bought Lotus in 1995.) I left Lotus in 1991. You’d think that IBM would have destroyed my personal data long ago, but they seem to have a policy of archiving former employee data forever. Now they have our current personal data, since IBM uses Kroll for both credit monitoring and investigations for the breach notice. I write a blog about my experiences dealing with this mess IBM has created and issues when companies lose the personal data of former employees:
http://ivebeenmugged.typepad.com
George
I worked for IBM in Endicott, NY from 1982-1986 and I too received a letter. Sounds like they lost a lot of data that spans a few decades. What bothers me the most is that you would think they would offer an IBM contact. I have some questions that I need to ask them, not Kroll.