If you didn’t hear about the fact that the incompetent clowns who run Louisiana’s Department of Motor Vehicles and have wasted millions upon millions of your tax dollars on ancient, obsolete computer infrastructure were broken into and your personal information stolen, here’s your notice of that…

State leaders are alerting Louisianans to a data breach that compromised information on record at the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles, potentially affecting anyone with a Louisiana driver’s license.

The Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness held a press conference Friday morning laying out a timeline for when the state first discovered the breach and describing the extent of the cyberattack.

According to GOHSEP Director Casey Tingle, anyone with a state-issued driver’s license, ID or car registration likely had their data compromised. As of Friday, the state says there is no indication that data has been publicly released.

“No indication” means you can count on the fact that everything the state has on you is sitting on the dark web right now thanks to OMV’s piss-poor security.

The breach at the OMV is reportedly part of a larger cyberattack affecting agencies across the U.S. and even other countries. Federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, were also impacted.

“The Office of Motor Vehicles in particular is a very legacy-facing organization, they have not modernized and kept pace. When you have data technology and a dated method of investigating and updating, patching and staying in tune to what’s happening, you’re really in a bad position,” Executive Vice President of the New Orleans Information and Technology Group Tammy Baker said.

Exactly. They’re sitting on 40-year-old computer infrastructure despite having billions of dollars flowing through the budget every year that could easily pay for routine maintenance and upgrades. Private companies a whole lot leaner and poorer than Louisiana’s state government never let software or hardware get more than six or eight years away from the state of the art, and yet the state is running on 1980’s technology.

And naturally it’s easy as hell to hack into it.

So here was the press release put out today after OMV got knocked over…

Louisiana’s Office of Motor Vehicles (OMV) is one of a still undetermined number of government entities, major businesses and organizations to be affected by the unprecedented MOVEit data breach.

MOVEit is an industry-leading third party data transfer service used to send large files. It is widely used across the country and around the world, and reports are rapidly emerging of newly discovered exposures of sensitive data in this major international cyber attack.

There is no indication at this time that cyber attackers who breached MOVEit have sold, used, shared or released the OMV data obtained from the MOVEit attack. The cyber attackers have not contacted state government. But all Louisianans should take immediate steps to safeguard their identity.

OMV believes that all Louisianans with a state-issued driver’s license, ID, or car registration have likely had the following data exposed to the cyber attackers:

-Name

-Address

-Social Security Number

-Birthdate

-Height

-Eye Color

-Driver’s License Number

-Vehicle Registration Information

-Handicap Placard Information

Gov. John Bel Edwards met with the Unified Command Group at 11 a.m. Thursday to be briefed on the incident, where he instructed the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), Office of Motor Vehicles (OMV), Louisiana State Police (LSP), and the Office of Technology Services (OTS) to act to inform Louisianans of the breach and their best next steps as soon as possible.

We recommend all Louisianans take the following steps immediately:

1. Prevent Unauthorized New Account Openings or Loans and Monitor Your Credit

Individuals can freeze and unfreeze their credit for free, which stops others from opening new accounts and borrowing money in your name. Freezing your credit does not prevent the use of any existing credit cards or bank accounts. Freezing your credit may be done quickly online or by contacting the three major credit bureaus by phone:

Experian 1-888-397-3742 www.experian.com/freeze

Equifax 1-800-685-1111 www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/

TransUnion (888) 909-8872 www.transunion.com/credit-freeze

Please also request and review your credit report from these agencies to look for suspicious activity.

2. Change All Passwords

As an additional precaution, consider changing all passwords for online accounts (examples: banking, social media, and healthcare portals) in the event your personal data was used to access these accounts. Utilize multi-factor authentication when able. Learn more about password protection at www.CISA.gov.

3. Protect Your Tax Refund and Returns with the Internal Revenue Service

To prevent someone else from filing returns or receiving your federal tax refund, request an “Identity Protection Pin” from the Internal Revenue Service by signing up at: https://www.irs.gov/identity-theft-fraud-scams/get-an-identity-protection-pin or calling the IRS at 1-800-829-1040.

4. Check your Social Security Benefits

All individuals who are eligible, applied for, and/or are receiving social security benefits (including disability), please consider registering for a ssa.gov account at https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/ to stop others from stealing your benefits. If you suspect Social Security fraud, call the Office of Inspector General hotline at 1-800-269-0271, Social Security Administration at 1-800-772-1213 or file a complaint online at oig.ssa.gov.

5. Report Suspected Identity Theft

If you suspect any abnormal activity involving your data, including financial information, contact the Federal Trade Commission at 1-877-FTC-HELP or visit www.ReportFraud.FTC.gov immediately.

The State of Louisiana will be issuing additional information in the coming days. Additional tips on protecting your data and identity can be found at nextsteps.la.gov and www.IdentityTheft.gov.

GOHSEP Director Casey Tingle will hold a press conference tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. to take media questions.

So it’s like this: the state of Louisiana forces you to surrender that data, and then the state of Louisiana stores it on third-party servers with piss-poor security, because for all the money it’s given it doesn’t maintain its own servers. Naturally, your information is promptly stolen from that third party the state entrusted it to. And then the state of Louisiana wants you to upend your life by wading through hell with credit bureaus and changing passwords and probably having to sign up for LifeLock and other such services.

To which the correct answer is “bullshit.”

This is John Bel Edwards’ problem. He’s responsible for this failure. He’s had more money to spend than any other Louisiana governor has ever dreamed of, and in his eighth year in office the Neolithic quality of his OMV’s data management finally bites us all in the rear end.

Rather than fix it he teams up with the corrupt RINO leadership in the legislature and wastes that money on idiotic pork projects rather than keeping the state’s digital infrastructure updated and secure, and this is what you get.

To hell with that.

This was a good idea…

For years, my office has held companies accountable for not protecting the personal information of Louisiana’s people. This OMV data breach is very alarming. At a minimum, the State should provide credit monitoring to those impacted. #lagov

— Jeff Landry (@JeffLandry) June 16, 2023

In fact, the Legislature ought to call itself into a special session to do just this – give credit monitoring FOR FREE to every single Louisianan who requests it.

It’s not that expensive. Companies like Experian offer it for free, though they’d surely charge Louisiana for a bulk service like this. So it’s going to cost the state SOMETHING to provide this to our people.

So call a special session to appropriate the money for that.

And while you’re at it, you can claw back some of the unbelievable, ridiculous pork in the state budget, not to mention fixing the numerous errors in that defective document that have been reasonably well described in media reports.

Plus, the special session can also be a veto override session for Edwards’ expected vetoes of key bills like HB 648, the pediatric sex-change ban bill, and his vindictive line-item vetoes of conservative legislators’ local projects above and beyond the blackballing of those projects in the budget itself.

His petty political gamesmanship has gone on a long time, but now that can’t mask the utter incompetence of his administration in protecting our data from hackers and identity thieves. Something has to be done about it. Right now.