Thieves gain access to about 140,000 social insurance numbers in NS Power database – Halifax [Video]

Nova Scotia Power’s CEO says up to 140,000 social insurance numbers could have been stolen by cyber-thieves who recently hacked into the utility’s customer records.

Peter Gregg said in an interview Thursday that the privately owned utility collected the numbers from customers to authenticate their identities.

“If there are a number of John MacDonalds, it (the social insurance number) determines which one we (the utility) are talking to,” Gregg said during the interview at the Halifax headquarters of the Emera subsidiary.

On May 23, Gregg said the data of about 280,000 Nova Scotia Power customers was breached in a ransomware attack — more than half of the total. Asked Thursday how many of these records contained the confidential, nine-digit social insurance numbers, Gregg replied, “approximately half.”

Cybersecurity expert Claudiu Popa questions why a utility would need to keep this kind of data about customers for customer authentication purposes.

The founder …