Immigration law firm Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy, LLP has disclosed that it suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of current and former Google employees. Fragomen is one of the largest U.S. immigration law firms, with over 582 attorneys in 47 locations worldwide.
In a data sent to Google employees affected by the data breach, Fragomen said it is responsible for providing I-9 identity and employment verification services to Google. According to the notification, the law firm recently learned that its network was breached and that the attacker gained access to a file containing the personal information of Google employees.
Specifically, the company's official announcement states the following: "We recently discovered suspicious activity on network . While our investigation is ongoing, we discovered that an unauthorized third party gained access to a file containing personal information related to our services . This file contains personal information of many Google employees, including you."
An I-9 form must be completed by all U.S. employees to declare their citizenship and eligibility to work in the country. This form contains information such as full name, date of birth, email address , phone number, Social Security number, passport numbers, and other immigration identifiers.
Since this information is very sensitive and can be used by malicious actors with the ultimate goal of identity theft or any other malicious activity, any affected Google users should be suspicious and check their credit reports for spear-phishing or other “fraudulent” activity.
As reported by BleepingComputer, Fragomen offers one year of free credit report monitoring to all affected Google users. So far, neither the law firm nor the tech giant have commented on the incident.
