Lexmark employees notified of breach
PERSONAL DATA BRIEFLY POSTED ON FILE TRANSFER SITE
Lexmark International told employees this week that information that would identify them personally was inadvertently posted on a company file transfer site.It’s uncertain whether anyone with malicious intent accessed the files.
The company will not say publicly what type of data was posted, but it did tell affected employees, said spokeswoman Barbara Leary. Lexmark also won’t say publicly how many employees were affected.Affected employees are being offered free credit-monitoring insurance and identity-theft insurance for a year.The incident occurred Jan. 29 when the data were posted to a site used to exchange information with third-party companies.”It wasn’t a breach of systems,” Leary said. “It was human error.”Within six hours, the release had been discovered and the files were removed, she said.”We know that there were a couple of unknown IP addresses that accessed the data,” Leary said. “We don’t know if they downloaded it.”The company waited to disclose the incident to investigate exactly what had happened, the nature of the data released and to discover who was affected, she said.