Nielsen Company Acknowledges Data Breach

The Nielsen Company recently began notifying an undisclosed number of employees that their personal information may have been exposed when an employee mistakenly shared a file containing the data by e-mail, according to eSecurityplanet.com.

"We recently discovered that on December 1, 2013, a Nielsen Audio Human Resources employee accidentally e-mailed a file listing Social Security numbers and names for a group of Nielsen Audio Employees to several other Nielsen employees who forwarded the e-mail to others within the Nielsen e-mail environment before realizing the e-mail's contents," company chief legal officer James W. Cuminale wrote in the notification letter [PDF].

Two days later, the company destroyed all copies of the e-mail within the Nielsen e-mail environment. "There is no indication that the attachment was ever printed, downloaded, or forwarded outside of the Nielsen environment," Cuminale wrote.

All those affected are being offered one free year of identity monitoring services