Los Angeles County officials say government servers for a range of county agencies were the target of a phishing attack in May, with 108 employees falling for the trick and potentially exposing the personal information of 756,000 clients, patients and other individuals associated with the agencies to hackers. Photo by TheDigitalWay/Pixabay.com

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- Personal information for more than three-quarters of a million people in Los Angeles County may have been compromised after someone gained access to computer servers using a phishing attack on county employees.

Los Angeles County officials said about 1,000 county employees were targeted with phishing attacks and enough fell for the ruse to allow hackers to access information on 756,000 people who work for the county or who received some type of service.


The L.A. District Attorney's office has already charged a Nigerian man, Austin Kelvin Onaghinor, 37, with nine felony counts, including unauthorized computer access and identity theft.

"These kinds of phishing attacks are on the rise throughout society -- and the county has not been immune from that trend," said Joel Sappell, a Los Angeles County spokesperson.

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Onaghinor is accused of sending emails to more than 1,000 county employees in May 2016, of which 108 believed them to be legitimate and attempted to log into a false link using their official usernames and passwords.

The officials say the county departments hit by the attacks have the potential to reveal personal information for 756,000 people who are clients, patients or have a professional relationship with several agencies. Among those whose information was accessed and possibly exposed are the county assessor, chief executive office, children and family services, child support services, probation, public health, public library and public works.

The type of information accessed on the computer systems may include first and last names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver's license information, payment information, bank information, addresses, phone numbers and other confidential health information.

In addition to investigating Onaghinor on the charges connected to the attack, L.A. County officials say they are working to harden their computer systems against these type of attacks, but that with the number of similar ones at all levels of government and business in the United States of late, they recognize it could be near-impossible to stop the next attack.

"The sad reality is, in general, as we want to be robust and flexible and have lots of features in our IT systems, we're going to have security failures along with it," said Ron Pike, assistant professor in computer information systems at Cal Poly Pomona. "It's just a reality. Thankfully, cybersecurity is getting better, but right now isn't a set of perfect solutions."

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