The good news is the numbers were not shown on the actual website pages but could have been accessed by a person looking at the source code of the website. This gaff was due to the Bureau updating the website’s search function for looking up agency and agent information. There old system used social security numbers while the new system is a national numbering system to track agents.
The press release further says, “the likelihood of finding the SSN was remote, access would have been possible from June 13 through July 31, 2006. The Bureau immediately corrected the programming error the same day it was discovered.”
I understand that mistakes happen but this is quite a serious mistake to happen and to go on for such a long period of time. Luckily it seems that a computer savvy person would have to stumble upon the SSN, and chances are that did not happen.
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