The Department of Licensing (DOL) learned of “suspicious activity involving professional and occupational license data,” on Jan. 24, it says on its website. As a safety measure, the DOL offlined its Professional Online Licensing and Regulatory Information System (POLARIS), which handles license issuance and renewals for 23 occupations such as architects, tattooists, cosmetologists and real estate brokers.
As such, POLARIS handles sensitive personal information like dates of birth, driver's license numbers and social security numbers. The DOL does not yet know whose data may have been exposed in the breach.
Members of the public also use POLARIS to check professionals’ licensing statuses and submit complaints against license holders.
The DOL is still working to get to the bottom of the incident, it said. It has been collaborating with the state Office of Cybersecurity to investigate the breach and with other “nationally recognized cybersecurity experts” to determine the full nature and impact of the event, the DOL says.
According to the Seattle Times state Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, said that Office of Cybersecurity officials sent the original warning after discovering conversations about the DOL on the dark web.
Carlyle, who is also chair of the Environment, Energy and Technology Committee, said investigators are still working to determine if hackers exfiltrated personal data or only exposed it and how much data may have been accessed. They also still must figure out how the breach happened in the first place; it is not yet officially known whether the issue stemmed from a third party or from the DOL itself.
DOL Communications Manager Christine Anthony said that POLARIS contains roughly 257,000 active licenses and that more records are likely to be discovered during the course of the investigation, per the Seattle Times.
The department said it will not penalize anyone for licenses that expire while the system is down. It has set up an alternate method for completing licensing in the interim that sees individuals download and complete forms, then email them to the department.
The department also set up a call center line last Friday to field questions related to the incident. The center ran in a limited manner through the weekend and is slated to ramp up to full capacity today.
