Nirave Gondhia reports: Update 2: After OnePlus emailed Jack Cooper to say they were patching the exploit that allowed him to hack the invite system (see original article bottom followed by the update below), Jake decided to hack the system yet again. This time, he used a couple of methods he first discovered when attempting to hack it the first…
Month: August 2015
Hacked e-mails: Boeing wants its drones to hack computers from the sky
Jacob Bogage reports: Drone have been used to drop bombs, spy on foreign countries and monitor how farmers work their fields. Now they could help hack into personal computers. According to e-mails posted by WikiLeaks, military contractors may want to do just that. Boeing and Hacking Team — a Milan-based company criticized for selling surveillance software to repressive governments — were in talks…
SterlingBackcheck reports stolen laptop contained background check information on job applicants (updated)
On May 29, a laptop with a spread sheet containing an undisclosed number of job applicants’ names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers was stolen from a SterlingBackcheck employee’s car. SterlingBackcheck (a trademark of Sterling Infosystems) learned of the theft on May 30, and notified law enforcement. The personal information in the spreadsheet came from two sources: the…
Higher Education Institutions Increasingly Falling Victim to Cyberattacks
Anna C. Watterson and Sean B. Hoar write: Higher education institutions are treasure troves for hackers. Colleges and universities are huge repositories of research data, sensitive information for large populations of applicants and enrolled students (personal, academic, financial and health data), as well as sensitive personal and tax information for all faculty and staff. Higher education…
UK: Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council undertaking
Here’s yet another case where an investigation of a breach resulted in the ICO discovering that an entity was not providing data protection training and re-training often enough. On October 10, 2014, the Information Commissioner (ICO) was informed that Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council had lost a file containing 66 records of families requiring Health services. There is no…
Prima CARE notifying patients after binders with protected health information found in bushes
According to its web site, Prima CARE, P.C. is a large, multi-specialty medical group serving southeastern New England. Also according to their web site, a former employee improperly discarded binders with protected health information. A notice linked from their home page explains: Prima CARE has Recovered Documents Containing Patient Information On June 4, 2015, Prima CARE…