The Local reports: Austrian police are investigating whether a Turkish nationalist group was behind a failed cyber attack on Vienna airport last week. Hackers attempted to penetrate the airport’s computer systems but were prevented from doing so. In a tweet, the hacker group “Aslan Neferler Tim” or “Lion Soldiers Team” says it launched the attack…
Month: September 2016
Seattle’s New Utility Billing System Experiences Privacy Breakdown
Mike Lindblom reports: Seattle’s new billing system for utilities, already afflicted by delays and cost overruns, launched Monday morning with a data flaw that sent 3,041 customers a link to other customers’ bills, including their names, addresses and energy or water use. Along with the privacy breakdown, the city sent six to 12 redundant email notices…
Billion-dollar hack – or not? A new approach to calculating true cost of security breaches
Katie Courage reports on some research by Yashwant Malaiya, professor of computer science in the College of Natural Sciences at Colorado State University and Abdullah Algarni, a doctoral researcher in the same department. Their research is oriented to developing a standard, public – and evolving – model that will permit more rigorous study on the costs of a…
WA: Highline Medical Center notifies 18,000 patients whose information was exposed on the Internet by third-party error
The R-C Healthcare Management error that resulted in Bon Secours notifying over 655,000 patients that their protected health information had been exposed on the Internet beginning in April also impacted CHI Franciscan Health Highline Medical Center in Washington. But unlike Bon Secours, which had a current relationship with the vendor, Highline was no longer a client at the time of…
DHS Exposes Thousands of Individuals’ Private Information — Including Feds, Golfers and Priests
Eric Katz reports: Customs and Border Protection released the personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, of thousands of individuals to dozens of federal agencies during an investigation of cheating on polygraph tests. CBP violated some aspects of the Privacy Act in distributing the information across government, the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general found in…
Danish tax authority pays source for names mentioned in Panama Papers
DPA reports: Denmark will pay an anonymous source for information about hundreds of Danish nationals mentioned in a data leak from a Panama-based law firm linked to tax-dodging schemes, the Danish minister of taxation said Wednesday. Karsten Lauritzen welcomed the fact that parliament’s tax committee broadly supported the scheme, but noted “there is a risk…