Illinois e-News Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

June 28, 2023

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Jennifer Jennings

SPRINGFIELD – As a result of the global MoveIT security breach, Illinois is moving to protect individuals’ private data and assist those directly impacted when international hackers took Illinois files housed in by a third party company. The Illinois Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT) is establishing a dedicated call center and providing credit monitoring to approximately 390,000 impacted individuals. Notices are starting to be mailed this week to all impacted individuals with information on registering for the credit monitoring.

“We take the security of the data we store very seriously and our team has prioritized comprehensive, swift action to address the incident,” said Illinois Department of Innovation & Technology Acting Secretary & State CIO Sanjay Gupta. “We understand the importance of transparency and our staff worked tirelessly to comb through the stolen information to identify individuals who information was taken. We are now notifying those individuals and making sure they have a place where they can get their additional questions answered.”

At this time, there is no indication any compromised information has been used fraudulently. The call center information is being shared only with impacted individuals so that they can receive the full attention of call center staff.

On May 31, 2023 international hackers launched a coordinated attack on large multinational businesses and governments. DoIT responded within hours and removed the hackers out of the state’s systems by securing the servers that were compromised and immediately implementing steps to protect against future attacks. In many of the worldwide attacks, the hackers obtained the personal information of millions of individuals.

Earlier this month, DoIT notified the Office of the Illinois Attorney General and the three credit reporting agencies about the attack. Federal and state authorities are actively monitoring dark web activity by the group of bad actors claiming responsibility for this event. DoIT is working in cooperation with law enforcement authorities on this matter.

To assist those impacted by these criminal acts, DoIT is offering credit monitoring services for 12 months with Experian’s® IdentityWorksSM. This product provides identity theft detection, identity restoration, and identity theft insurance.

Data breaches have become a major concern for organizations of all sizes, as cybercriminals continue to develop increasingly sophisticated methods for accessing sensitive information. While DoIT was unfortunately one of the many affected organizations of this act, the recent breach was relatively small in comparison to the millions of impacted residents in other states.