The Maryland Department of Labor announced it has suffered a data breach announced that exposed personally identifiable information.

The Maryland Department of Labor suffered a data breach, hackers accessed databases containing personally identifiable information (PII).

The security breach was discovered earlier this year, hackers also accessed data stored in the Literacy Works Information System and a legacy unemployment insurance service database. According to the Maryland Department of Labor, attackers don’t have exfiltrated the data or misused them.

“Earlier this year, at the request of the Maryland Department of Labor, the Maryland Department of Information Technology—the agency overseeing all state information technology functions and policies—initiated an investigation and determined that files stored on the Literacy Works Information System and a legacy unemployment insurance service database were subject to possible unauthorized access through the Internet.” reads the data breach notice published by the Maryland Department.

“Upon notification of the possibility of unauthorized access, Maryland DoIT implemented countermeasures and initiated an investigation.”

Threat actors accessed to files stored in the Literacy Works Information System that are dated back 2009, 2010, and 2014. Exposed data includes first names, last names, social security numbers, dates of birth, city or county of residence, graduation dates and record numbers.

Regarding files in the affected unemployment insurance service database, they are dated back from 2013 and contained first names, last names, and social security numbers.

“While some personally identifiable information may have been accessed without authorization, a thorough investigation conducted by the Department has not revealed any misuse of the accessed data.” continues the Department .

“To date, this investigation has not produced evidence to confirm that any personally identifiable information was downloaded or extracted from Labor servers,”

The Maryland DoIT has already implemented measures to mitigate the incident and reported it to law enforcement. The Department hired an independent expert to investigate the data breach.

The Department is notifying the impacted customers, potentially affected users have to carefully monitor their accounts.

The IT staff has completed a full review of the department’s protocols and implemented additional security measures to prevent future incidents.

At the time the Department of Labor did not disclose the number of impacted customers, but Maryland’s WMAR-2 estimates that 78,000 people may have been impacted.

Pierluigi Paganini