A recent news story highlights a new place identity thieves are looking for personal information:

Companies’ employment Web sites.

Sensitive information about 65,000 Aetna employees and job applicants was compromised after hackers broke into the company’s job application Web site. The site was owned and operated by a third party.

Information stored included e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses and Social Security numbers for employees, the Associated Press reports.

No word on whether the SSNs were copied, but Aetna has said that several applicants were contacted via e-mail by someone impersonating the company’s HR department. The applicants were told they were being offered a job and asked for personal information.

After learning about the phony job offers, Aetna shut down the site to investigate. The company is offering a year of free crediting monitoring to anyone whose SSN was stored on the site.

Tags: employment site, job applicant, security