Drew Tripp reports: Dorchester School District 2 officials say no student or staff member’s identity information was stolen or compromised in a ransomware attack on the district’s computer network servers over the summer, but that some files were corrupted and lost, and the district was forced to pay a ransom to regain access to other…
Month: August 2017
Watchdog pressed to probe post-data breach services
Morgan Chalfant reports: Democratic members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee are pressing a government watchdog to further investigate whether existing credit monitoring services do enough to protect consumers affected by data breaches. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report in March on identity theft services offered by the federal government and private companies…
GAO to agencies: Stop using Social Security numbers for everything
There really is such as a thing as “obvious.” Isn’t there? Adam Stone reports: Federal agencies continue to over-collect, over-use and over-display Social Security numbers, leading to the an unnecessarily high risk of identity theft. That’s the latest from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In a recent report GAO declares that a decade’s worth of…
UK: Nottinghamshire County Council fined £70,000 for data protection breach
From the Information Commissioner’s Office: A council has been fined £70,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for leaving vulnerable people’s personal information exposed online for five years. The Data Protection Act requires organisations to take appropriate measures to keep personal data secure, especially when dealing with sensitive information. But Nottinghamshire County Council posted the…
Largest healthcare provider in western New York successfully phished in two consecutive months
Having to notify almost 2,800 patients because an employee fell for a phishing attack is not something most healthcare providers would exactly relish. Having to notify 2,800 patients in July and then another 744 patients in August because there were phishing incidents in two consecutive months, well,….. ouch. But that’s the situation Kaleida Health in…
At risk of hack, 465,000 pacemakers are recalled for software update
Shortly after 9/11, my mother collapsed on the street in NYC. Thanks to super prompt response by police and EMS, she survived and had a pacemaker installed. And from that moment until her death 11 years later, I never stopped worrying that someone would try to hack her pacemaker. Today, Ian Sherr reports: Sometimes life…