Thanks to the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, I just received copies of the 22 breach reports they received in January of this year. They’ll be sending me the rest of the reports received this year in the very near future. Looking through what they sent me, I see that we knew about the majority of these incidents already via the media or other primary sources like New Hampshire and Maine, but there are some breach reports that are either news to us to or which we knew something about but didn’t have actual breach reports or details for.
Newly revealed:
- The Brookings Institution notified MD that in December 2009 an unnamed third-party vendor that handles receipts of incoming parcels lost a package containing a CD with draft W-2 statements for employees. The draft W-2’s contained names, addresses, and Social Security Numbers. The total number affected wasn’t indicated, but 143 Maryland residents were notified.
- The previously reported incident involving an employee at the Time fulfillment center in Florida (Time Customer Service) also affected customers of Harvard Business Review.
- Kaiser Permanente reported that a fax error exposed insured members’ information to another group member.
- In what was its second incident report for the month, HSBC wrote that “a fraudster successfully social engineered customer information by misrepresenting themselves as an employee of HSBC. As a result, an employee at a call center changed information pertaining to 14 customer accounts.” At the time of the second letter, HSBC was unaware of any fraudulent use of the customer information.
- Financial services firm Jones Lang LaSalle reported that or on about December 17, 2009, an employee’s laptop was stolen from their car in Chicago. The laptop contained password-protected (but not encrypted) employee data on 20 employees, including their names, addresses, bank routing number, and bank account numbers for direct deposit of their paychecks. The company said that it was now “considering encryption of all computers used by Human Resources personnel, as well as other computers that contain sensitive personal information.”
Noted previously but without details until now:
- The Building Media hack that I had previously noted based on NYS Consumer Protection’s logs reportedly involved several web sites they administer. According to their report, they did not find evidence that the hacker accessed customer data, but names, credit card numbers, expiration date, and card types were stored on the servers.
- The incident involving a Gap insider I had previously noted based on NYS’s logs reportedly involved an employee at Gap’s Online Call Center in Ohio accessing customers’ names, billing addresses, credit card numbers, and CVV.
- The Health Net inadvertent disclosure incident previously noted based on NYS’s logs involved the company sending insured members’ names, enrollment dates, and Medicare SSN to the wrong agent.
- The HSBC Nevada Bank “fraudulent access” incident previously listed based on NYS’s logs was due to an insider accessing customer data and using it to purchase goods between July 17 and November 18, 2009.
- The P.F. Chang’s computer theft, covered previously on this site, affected 3,205 Maryland residents.
Copies of all 22 breach reports are being sent to the Open Security Foundation for their primary sources project.