I know that this type of identity theft is why so many people are working on identity solutions.  I believe that these types of incidents are going to be on the raise for a while.  What is interesting to me is that I am not sure that this can prevented except through the use of harsh penalties.

What we have is a company who specializes in outsourcing various work, and number of companies who have entrusted their customers – and their identity data – to this outsourcing entity.  Within the outsourcing entity, there are employees – or this one employee – who saw the opportunity to compromise the system from the inside!

While I was working at Novell, we often saw the hacker/security breach reports that floated around, and in almost all of the cases that I could remember the biggest breaches were from the inside!  We can do everything that we want to protect the identities of others, however when we have someone within our company – within our community or context – that is committed to exploiting our identity for their own purposes, there is little we can do.  This becomes a fundamental breakdown within that community … and for significant violations in the past there were severe punishments.  This truly gets at the roots of the meaning of being fired!

Indian call center worker arrested. In a new case of alleged data theft, Indian police have arrested a call center employee in the outsourcing hub of Gurgaon. [CNET News.com]

[tags: identity digitalidentity fired community security ]