Rachel Dumbrique emailed her Yahoo account from her office computer on her last day at work. Inside the email attachment just happened to be a personnel file containing names and social security numbers of her 5,000 fellow employees at California's Department of Consumer Affairs.
Consumer Affairs uses special email filtering software, so Ms. Dumbrique's email was spotted and a copy was sent to a special security account. It sat there for two days before anyone reviewed the email.
Department spokesman, Russ Heimerich, said its filtering software catches between 30 and 70 suspicious emails that are reviewed one at a time by a person and the vast majority are legitimate. Heimerich said, because this e-mail went out late on a Friday, that in-box where those suspected e-mails are duplicated did not get checked until Monday morning.
Consumer Affairs notified all employees that their personal information might be compromised. They offered no cost identity theft protection services, credit monitoring and fraud insurance for a year to everyone affected.
A not so minor piece of information the Department didn't pass along to the staff was that Ms. Dumbrique recently married a member of the Mexican Mafia, Edward Dumbrique, who is serving a 29-year prison sentence in state prison for a drive-by murder in Southern California.
The week after Ms. Dumbrique sent the email, her home was raided by Consumer Affairs investigators who took two computers, CDs and confidential documents from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation out of a bedroom closet.
Ms. Dumbrique is currently an employee of the California Department of Mental Health. X |