Officials from the Illinois Secretary of State's office disclosed the compromise of residents' driver's license details and Social Security numbers following a phishing attack against its employees in April, StateScoop reports.
Threat actors leveraged a legitimate email account from a Lake County employee to target the emails of two of the office's employees and obtain access to residents' data before the attack was contained hours later, noted a statement from the office of Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias.
Breach notices have already been sent to 50,000 individuals across the state, who were informed that the incident did not affect any of the office's databases.
"The Secretary of State's office takes these issues extremely seriously and has engaged multiple third-party cyber security experts to conduct a forensic audit to ascertain the origin of the unauthorized access, strengthen its data security framework against future attacks, and implement additional security measures and oversight," the statement said.
