Consumer Data Under Siege

Identity thieves have penetrated another company that collects and sells personal information on millions of U.S. consumers, the latest in a series of breaches that is throwing a spotlight on the practices and safeguards of a booming data-collection industry.

LexisNexis, a worldwide provider of legal and business data, announced yesterday that information about 32,000 consumers was fraudulently gathered in a series of incidents. The data include names, addresses and Social Security and driver’s license numbers.

The breaches occurred at the company’s recently acquired Seisint Inc. subsidiary, a Florida firm that sells data amassed from extensive public records searches to law enforcement agencies, businesses, private investigators and others.

Kurt Sanford, president and chief executive of the LexisNexis corporate and federal markets unit, said company investigators discovered that fraud artists had assumed the identities and used the passwords of legitimate customers to download the customer data.

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