Data Breach May Have Exposed Info Of 16,000 Washington Workers

TUMWATER, WA — The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries says a recent hacker attack may have exposed the data of thousands of Washington employees.

According to L&I, on May 22 one of its contractors, Pacific Market Research, was hit by a ransomware attack, which encrypted data stored on some of their servers. That data included the contact information, claim numbers and dates of birth of some 16,466 workers who had filed workers' compensation claims in 2019.

L&I says Pacific Market Research had been given the data to help conduct a customer service survey. The data did not include medical information, social security numbers, bank information or credit card numbers.

The encrypted data has since been recovered and based on an investigation into the attack, L&I says it does not appear that the data was actually accessed by the hackers — only locked away with the intention of selling it back to Pacific Market Research — but they cannot be totally certain that the workers' information was not exposed.

As a result, the department has begun notifying all 16,466 Washingtonians whose data may have been exposed, and will be offering them a year of free credit monitoring. The state will also be notifying 9,400 employers whose L&I account numbers were also included in the stolen document.