VA to Offer Veterans Free Credit Monitoring

As has been noted here before, the standard response to a large data breach is to offer the victims" a year of free credit monitoring.

However, with 26 million people, that could be quite expensive. On the other hand, the federal government can probably afford it.

Department of Veteran Affairs has announced it will offer free credit monitoring for veterans affected the recently security breach.

So at least the credit agencies will make some money.

Unsurprisingly, there are not actually 26.5 million individuals affected, but even a fraction of that will require some financial scrambling.

The VA has already spent $25 million on an initial mailing and $200,000 per day on call centers.

The VA is also hiring a special adviser on information security, accelerating security and privacy training, and reviewing procedures for accessing and storing sensitive data. All this plus the credit monitoring shows the true costs of poor data security.