Personal data on 3.3 million people have been stolen from the company that guarantees student loans in Virginia and two other states, authorities said.

The theft occurred last weekend at the headquarters in St. Paul, Minn, of ECMC, which has been the designated federal student loan guaranty agency in Virginia since 1996. The nonprofit company also guarantees loans in Oregon and Connecticut.

Information that was taken included names, addresses, birth dates and social security numbers, ECMC said Friday in a news release. It said no bank or other financial account information was taken.

“This is old-fashioned” theft, rather than any form of computer hacking, Paul Kelash, a spokesman for ECMC, said in an interview.

The news release said the theft involved “portable media with personally identifiable information.” Kelash declined to describe the object taken or to give other details of the theft. “All I can say is that it is a portable media device,” he said.

Oh, yeah, that’s comforting. Someone didn’t have a crappy online security system in place, they just let someone walk off with a thumb-drive with your personal information on it.

Question: Why the frak is that information on a thumb-drive, or any type of “portable media”, in the first place?!

Ladies and gentlemen, this will be what’s going to happen to your medical records in a few years thanks to ObamaCare.

Cross-posted at On The Right and Virginia Virtucon.

UPDATE: The right-wing liberal has more.