Roy Urrico reports: Weeks after the Federal government began sending snail mail notifications to the 21.5 million victims of the Office of Personnel Management breach, the Department of Defense proposed creating a hack victims database. The Pentagon’s proposed database, the Defense Manpower Data Center, would store the information in a “holding file,” according to an…
Month: October 2015
NZ: Law breach likely over Hager bank data
NZME reports: A legal expert says police have probably broken the law by obtaining the personal bank information of journalist Nicky Hager without a court order. Court records show detectives investigating the hacking of Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater’s computer obtained nearly 10 months of transactions from Mr Hager’s accounts from Westpac without the legal…
B.C. privacy breach lawsuit against RCMP may expand
Jeremy Lye reports: A lawsuit citing an alleged privacy breach of two former Mounties’ medical files could be getting bigger. Derrick Ross and David Reichert filed a civil claim earlier this month that the RCMP unlawfully accessed their confidential counselling records without their knowledge. Meanwhile Rob Creasser of the Mounted Police Professional Association of Canada…
Hacktivism: A single hacker is taking down racist and homophobic sites one by one
Emil Protalinski writes: A hacker who goes by the name of Amped Attacks specializes in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS). Unlike some hackers who take out websites and services that many rely on, Amped Attacks prefers to target racist and homophobic bullshit. Read more on VentureBeat. While some may nod their heads approvingly because well, we hate these sites,…
Russia ‘tried to hack MH17 inquiry system’
Phys.org reports: Russian spies likely tried to hack into the Dutch Safety Board’s computer systems to access a sensitive final report into the shooting down of flight MH17 over Ukraine, experts said Friday. The cyberattacks were revealed by security experts Trend Micro which blamed a shadowy group dubbed Operation Pawn Storm, “an active economic and…
Failure to update software left Naperville computers vulnerable: report
A costly reminder of the need to patch and update promptly. Geoff Ziezulewicz reports: Hackers were able to break into Naperville’s computer network in an unprecedented 2012 cyber attack because of a vulnerability in the city’s web software that had not been patched, even though an alert and update had been released roughly a month…