Kong See Hoh reports on a breach involving 300,000 students’ and their parents’ personal information. The Personal Data Protection Department (JPDP) urges parents of students whose personal data were reportedly leaked to demand an explanation from the Education Ministry. JPDP said if they are not happy with the ministry’s explanation, they can lodge complaints with…
Month: December 2015
Hillsides, a Pasadena child welfare agency, warns of data breach
Brian Day reports on another insider breach involving a HIPAA-covered entity: A Pasadena child welfare agency has warned of a computer security breach that may have exposed the personal information of nearly 1,000 clients and staff members. Hillsides, 940 Avenue 64, announced the data breach Wednesday. It was first discovered Dec. 8, when Hillsides officials…
Microsoft failed to warn victims of Chinese email hack–former employees
Joseph Menn reports on some poor decision-making by Microsoft that left hacking victims in the dark that their communications had been intercepted: Microsoft Corp experts concluded several years ago that Chinese authorities had hacked into more than a thousand Hotmail email accounts, targeting international leaders of China’s Tibetan and Uighur minorities in particular – but…
Oregon Employment Department computers still vulnerable a year after breach
Hillary Borrud reports: Computer systems at the Oregon Employment Department remain vulnerable more than a year after a major data breach at the agency, according to a state audit released this week. State employees have taken steps to tighten the Employment Department’s cyber security, but auditors found that problems remain. These include a lack of…
Did AVG leave your personal data exposed?
Ian Sherr reports: Ever had a day where you just wanted to shout, “You had one job“? The latest company to earn the rebuke is Netherlands-based antivirus software maker AVG, whose “Web tuneup” add-on for the Google Chrome browser promised to protect you from surfing to unsafe sites on the Internet. It turns out the…
More details emerge on Steam’s Christmas breach; 34,000 impacted
Valve is now apologizing for the Christmas day incident that exposed users’ information to each other almost randomly. Here’s their announcement today: On December 25th, a configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store pages generated for other users. Between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST store page requests for about 34k users, which contained sensitive…