Miles Klee reports a less-than-impressive sentence in a privacy breach case involving a police officer: Weeks after the state secured its first conviction under a new revenge porn law, a California Highway Patrol officer pled no contest to felony charges over duplicating and sharing intimate photos found on the phones of women in his custody—and got three years’ probation. Sean Harrington,…
Month: January 2015
Quinn Norton: We Should All Step Back from Security Journalism. I’ll Go First.
Last week, Quinn Norton wrote a disturbing and thoughtful essay. Those of us who conduct research or investigate and report on breaches generally share her concerns, if not her decision to withdraw from security journalism. The Barrett Brown case, and the prosecution’s attempt to criminalize linking to publicly available data may lead others, too, to…
UK: ICO reports on community healthcare providers’ data protection
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today published a report looking at how community healthcare providers approach data protection. Community providers are an increasingly important part of the NHS, providing cradle to grave services worth over £11 billion a year. But they often involve staff working at remote locations or off-site entirely. This brings particular…
PA: Woman Charged In A Multi-State Bank Fraud And Identity Theft Scheme
The United States Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced today that an indictment was returned by a grand jury charging a New York woman with bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. Njeri Bowen, age 26, a resident of New York, defrauded a PNC Bank in State College and more than 25 PNC Bank…
Thieves hit 13 Wells Fargo mortgage offices in 5 states to steal IDs
Scott Daugherty reports: They drove up and down the East Coast trying to break into Wells Fargo mortgage offices, according to court documents. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Maryland. Thirteen locations in all. Jeffrey “Lef” Washington and his crew weren’t interested in cash, though. The money would come later. They wanted the personal…
United website breach let fliers see each others’ private data
I reported on the United Airlines MileagePlus incident earlier this month, but now Cory Doctorow is reporting yet another breach involving United Airlines: My wife came back from giving a conference speech in Las Vegas in December with the weirdest story: when she fired up the United check-in mobile site, she found herself looking at…