IDHA Rental Assistance Portal Hit By Data Breach Due to Coding Error

By Benjamin Cox on February 10, 2022 at 8:41pm

A portal through which Illinois tenants impacted by COVID-19 can apply for rental assistance is back online after a programming problem compromised some personal information.

An applicant called the Illinois Housing Development Authority last Tuesday alerting them to the personal information breach.

Agency spokeswoman Amy Lee told the Bloomington Pantagraph that the applicant said they saw someone else’s document when they logged into their rental application.

The portal went offline and all access to external users was blocked while the agency resolved the issue. The portal went back online last Thursday after IDHA found a coding error on the application website. IDHA says that the error likely affected about 100 out of the over 89,000 rental assistance applications in their system.